Better way to push emails to an Arduino?

Projects Networking, Protocols, and Devices
1

I was wondering if there was a better way to push emails to my arduino.

Right now this is what happens:

  1. Email is received by Gmail and a copy if it is forwarded to an arbitrary email address.
  2. The forwarded copy is processed through my webhost and piped to a PHP program.
  3. The PHP program discards the email and uses cURL to send a POST command to the Arduino's ethernet shield telling it to check for mail.
  4. The Arduino checks a PHP page I have running that uses GmAtom to output the number of unread emails, which the Arduino displays on a serial LCD.
2

Are you trying to push actual emails or an unread count?

You could maybe improve upon what you've got by POSTing the count instead of just yanking the arduino's chain and making it do more of the work...

3

You could implement a mail server on the Arduino, and have gmail forward the email directly to its IP address.
Be aware that these days even a one-word email is likely to have several thousand bytes of tracking headers and such.