Piping Mail

I am so annoyed with all of these trouble ticketing systems that just don't work (at least not how I want them to). So, I am going to build my own. It all seems like a simple task, to me. I'm stuck at one point, however. I need to be able to accept e-mail requests into the ticket system and I don't want to use IMAP or POP3 features to do this.

I know it's possible to pipe mail into a php script. I've seen it done. I just don't know how to do it. Does anyone have any suggestions as to how to receive mail into a php script? Once it's in the script, I can work with it. I just need to know how to get it into the script :-)

Thanks a million!