Hi,

I have this following problem:

At my students room we have this server (running Gentoo), which is used to account the down and upload volume (using freeRadius/Chillispot)from all students.
But we also have this messages/post (PHP/mysql) system on the login page, so when users go to the login page, they see the latest messages, and they can post a message as well.

The problem is that the owner of the student's room also wants to post messages, but he doesn't have a computer. Though he can send emails using his digital tv or something.

This is my solution: I make an email address(blabla@gmail.com), the owner just sends a mail to blabla@gmail.com. The server periodically (cron?) checks for new mail at this address, parses the message, and then posts it on the messages system.

How do I achieve this? (checking gmail, retrieving newest message, parsing message so that it can be piped to a script for further processing).

Sorry for my long question, thanks in advance.

Greetz Daan.

P.s. If you have better ideas, tell me please!

you could use fetchmail to pull down the messages into a mailbox. Then have a cron job run a script afterward that would look at what ever needed parsing then send them to wherever they need to go.