I take far too long replying to Facebook messages because they dont come to my Mail inbox. I like that the full message is emailed to me but I hate that i cannot reply and have the message go to the sender, and so they go on sitting there without replies. Why doesnt Facebook allow us to download the messages via IMAP so we can respond to them in our own systems?
Either Facebook should develop an IMAP system to read and reply to Facebook messages (Im only talking about the Mail, not wall posts or anything silly like that), or someone should develop a third-party system that integrates Facebook mail with IMAP.
I dont know a lot about the Facebook API’s but I would hope there was some way to access your own Mail messages through the API. I also dont know a lot about how IMAP is built, but in my mind either an IMAP plugin (if such a thing is possible) to fetch mail from Facebook, or simply a system that fetches mail from Facebook using the credentials supplied by the user and pushes them into an IMAP system (tweaking the headers to put in a different Reply-To address – something like “reply-FACEBOOKMESSAGEID@fbmail.com” – so replies would go back to this third-party system which would then push the reply back into Facebook).