Beginner Advice (which board to trigger light on email)

Bass, if you want to go down the Arduino route then you'll need a Ethernet or Wifi Shield. You might want to look at something like http://shrimping.it/blog/ if it's to be a permanant solution.

If you want to go Wifi then you might find that the Wifi shields are rather expensive but you could look at using something like a cheap wifi router in client mode, the TP-Link ones are small and relatively cheap. There's some examples here that might help http://londuino.com/london-arduino-event-4/

You should be able build a stand-alone email notifier with the Arduino but you'd need to code something to work with the protocols of your mail server, it's really just sending it strings and parsing the results. Other boards might make this easier by already having libraries for parsing.

A basic outline of what you'd need is:

Connect

Login

Select the inbox

Store the results of server response

Quit

Parse the response

The reason for parsing after quitting is to minimise the connection time.

There's a few people who've done this already, some with assistance of a PC sending data to the Arduino as you suggested but the first example just uses an Arduino.

http://forum.arduino.cc/index.php/topic,7931.0.html

http://mohacks.com/simple-arduino-gmail-notifier-project/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VcyQYUfwpqU

Have fun with your project, look forward to seeing the results.

Cheers,

Andy

Bass, if you want to go down the Arduino route then you'll need a Ethernet or Wifi Shield. You might want to look at something like http://shrimping.it/blog/ if it's to be a permanant solution.

If you want to go Wifi then you might find that the Wifi shields are rather expensive but you could look at using something like a cheap wifi router in client mode, the TP-Link ones are small and relatively cheap. There's some examples here that might help http://londuino.com/london-arduino-event-4/

You should be able build a stand-alone email notifier with the Arduino but you'd need to code something to work with the protocols of your mail server, it's really just sending it strings and parsing the results. Other boards might make this easier by already having libraries for parsing.

A basic outline of what you'd need is:

Connect

Login

Select the inbox

Store the results of server response

Quit

Parse the response

The reason for parsing after quitting is to minimise the connection time.

There's a few people who've done this already, some with assistance of a PC sending data to the Arduino as you suggested but the first example just uses an Arduino.

http://forum.arduino.cc/index.php/topic,7931.0.html

http://mohacks.com/simple-arduino-gmail-notifier-project/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VcyQYUfwpqU

Have fun with your project, look forward to seeing the results.

Cheers,

Andy