title: Best Practices for receiving email in rails
body: <p>I've been trying to figure out the best way to handle incoming email in a rails applications.  I realize "best practices" is quite subjective, so I'll start by stating that my primary concerns are scalability and efficiency.  This is an issue primarily because my use will involve handling potentially large attachments.</p>
  
  <p>Seems like just yesterday the accepted method was to use ActionMailer to receive the email, but recently I've stumbled across several articles saying this is inefficient as it spawns a new rails instance with each email (horrible at high volumes).</p>
  
  <p>Most recently, this article has been getting my attention:
  <a href="http://jasonseifer.com/2009/04/24/receving-email-with-rails" rel="noreferrer">http://jasonseifer.com/2009/04/24/receving-email-with-rails</a></p>
  
  <p>The post talks about a slimmed down version of the ActionMailer system that isn't forced to spawn an entire rails instance, but the comments talk about several other options like a dedicated mail directory (maildir?) and imap/pop retrieval.  </p>
  
  <p>My question is: Does anyone have any thoughts on what the best option would currently be for processing incoming email in a rails application (including attachments)?</p>