We ended up running it through the Outlook channel in pipelines using a shared email attached to a service account. We split our notes onto a child table from the ticket information instead of a tracked text field.
The user is just for support tickets and we have a pipeline that looks at every email that comes in. We added a leader to the record number to create ticket number so it could be parsed with an expression in the pipeline. It looks if there is a ticket number in the header, and if so it updates that record. If not it creates a record.
Then we created notifications through the outlook channel in pipelines (mostly to use full html to align with branding). The notifications all have a line in white text --do not write above this line on reply-- and are exuding everything below that from the body with a regular expression. We also have a record link and a link to add a note record directly.
It's worked well in testing, and rolled to our users today, so fingers crossed.
------------------------------
Sean Boat-Moore
Manager SMB Development
Project Management Office and Quality Control
NCR Corporation
sean.boat-moore@ncr.com | ncr.com
------------------------------