This can be implemented without the need for a shell script. You can do it by dedicating either a pop account or using a catchall account to send mail to and then use the pear mail scripts to check, download and parse the e-mail and store it in a DB table.

My xmail module will do this using a catchall account, giving each and every XOOPS user an e-mail account based on their reg info. When a new e-mail comes in the script parses the e-mail and stores the e-mail in a DB table assigned to the users ID. It will support autoresponders, filters and more.

For your idea you could simply make a defunc user account and then send all your news, article or whatever to that e-mail. Then a second script would check the table for new messages and parse the content into the according DB tables (News, articles or whatever) from there. No shell needed. Infact you could use a dumb down version of xmail to make an update module to perfom only this task.

And for those curious, xmail is still a ways off of a release. Sorry.

draven, i thought i already mentioned it, but anyways, you can use automail.pl and have all the mail forwarded to the pl script, OR you can use a pop3 acct, just like what you mentioned

it's already written into the app, the work is already done