Mailing list combined with PHP based forum

PHP Users, I'm creating a PHP based forum, and what I'd like to do is have it work so that people can view and read the information via email, just like a mailing list. Yahoo! Groups does this, so I know this sort of thing is possible in principle. But so far as I can tell, open source PHP based forums, like phpBB and Simple Machines, don't commonly have this feature. Perhaps it's not possible with PHP? I would imagine this is accomplished with a Cron job that checks an email account and passes the messages to the PHP system for parsing into the forum. Can anyone start me off with some tips as to how, and if, this might be possible? Thanks for any advice or informaiton. -- Dave M G Ubuntu 6.06 LTS Kernel 2.6.17.7 Pentium D Dual Core Processor PHP 5, MySQL 5, Apache 2