Hi Michael,
Thank you for your feature request! You do have a couple options available to you now, that can address this. 1) Email Sync - this syncs your email inbox with your Ontraport account so you can see incoming messages from your customers, and respond to them from your inbox. 2) You can send one-off emails within a contact record, and canned responses and templates can be used with Quick Mail.
The good news is we do have a project on our roadmap already for this need, though I do not have an ETA for its status or completion. But it's coming!