How does approval through email work

Question

How does salesforce know which record is being approved when approving/rejecting through email.

I have an ask to take the content of any email sent throguh the approval process and make it a post to the feed of the record being approved. This entails any comments entered in by the approver as well as emails sent between the approver and the submitter. Ideally I would like those people to comment on the record feed directly but they don't use chatter currently for this type of communication. To try and make this fit into their current process I was thinking of using a cutom email handler to make the posts but I'm looking for a good way to uniquely identify the record from within the email handler

Answer 1

The most simplest way to achieve your requirement would be Enabling Email Approval Response. It will give the users a capability to approve or reject a record by sending a reply on an auto-generated email from Salesforce.

However, if you want to customize the requirement, you can do the following:

• Send Approval notification from Salesforce using a Custom Template and include the record Id in the subject line.
• The User sends a reply as "Yes" or "No" and your Email Service Class would simply fetch the record Id from the subject to identify the record.

But the thing is, why to complicate the requirement if it's possible through standard features. If you have some complex processes to initiate then email service would be good.