I set up email piping–it is very straight forward in Linux using cPanel.  Pretty much whenever an email gets sent to support@domain.tld, it gets forwarded to the PHP piping script, and that adds it to the application.  The alternative method of doing email piping is not true email piping–it is cron piping.  In Windows, you use Scheduled Tasks as oppose to Crontabs (Linux).  This method is useful for Linux when the email server that does the forwarding is not on the same machine as the server with the application.  Using cron piping, every X amount of time, the script logs into the mailbox via POP or IMAP and reads the emails, and then pulls it into the application.  Definitely a lot less efficient than true email piping, as CPU cycles and bandwidth is wasted each X amount of time, even when there are no emails coming in.