Capture Emails in ProcessFlow

Not quite what you're describing but an alternative is the mobile inbasket.

We already use the mobile inbasket but in order for it work you must be able to connect to the intranet. Our standard mobile device is Blackberry and it has a built in tunnel through the BES but for other devices nothing. I'm trying to solve the other devices. If I can create a means to capture an email reply and act on it I can get around the access issue for now. Problem...not sure if or how it can be done.

Sorry about mentioning the mobile inbasket; I misread your initial post.

The challenge with handling approvals via email is that the user still has to login/authenticate and/or somehow get associated to the approve/reject action.

Not sure what your timeframe/budget is, but a couple of half-baked ideas:

1) write a custom PFI/BCI connector using the SDK that implements a POP3 and retrieves emails sent to a specified email address/alias. In your outbound message, include a mailto: link for approve and a different one for reject; sending them to different email addresses for approve vs. reject and put the workunit into the email subject. In the connector you would pass the from address from the message, as well as the workunit and based on the incoming address, the action to take. The flow would have to use the from address to figure out the user, and simulate the user action.
2) If you don't want to write a custom connector, you could script something that does similar POP3 retrieval and writes a file to a specific directory, and use PFI scanfileclient to process them as above.

Be aware that you do have the danger that fraudulent emails could trigger approvals, as it's not hard to spoof the from address on an email...

Oh, and by the way, that functionality is in Lawson Process Automation/Integration, which you will be upgrading to before/in conjunction with S3 10