how do you practically send and receive mandrill

I know how to send email using mandrill api and i know how to read the json data off from webhooks. However, do use mandrill effectively do i need to invent email client.

Is there a way to integrate mandrill to gmail or any other email service/client.. so when i send emails they go via mandrill and when i get email it shows up there.

or like gui for mandrill?

Ideally this is what should happen

Someone sends email to support@mycompany.com

customer@abc.com > support@mycompany.com > mandrill > mandrillmiddle@mandrill.com > my@gmail.com

Then I reply back to it

me > mandrillmiddle@mandrill.com > support@mycompany.com > customer@abc.com

For Sending:

Mandrill supports SMTP, so you can use something like nodemailer to send emails via mandrill to your customers, visit following link:

http://help.mandrill.com/entries/21738467-Using-Mandrill-s-SMTP-integration-with-Web-Frameworks

For Receiving

To receive mails, you will probably call mandrill rest APIs, there seem to be an official wrapper for it:

https://bitbucket.org/mailchimp/mandrill-api-node

Hope it helps.