creating a mailbot in php

Greetings, I have been trying to come up with a script in PHP to take an email and do a little parsing and upload the data into a mysql database. However I have had a couple of glitches. Would someone be so nice to send me the code to just get it to do something (like update a counter or anything) simple that I will be able to tell if the email is getting to the script or not? My host has an option that allows you to easily make an alias [by way of an html form] that will send emails to certain files and I can not tell if it is not working or if my script is not working. I have tried to read around and could not figure it out. I wish I could RTFM but I cant find one. The few pages I found on the net do not give a good enough explaination. Thanks, Leonard Burton Wilmington, NC lbburt0@uky.edu