Post via email hacks? (Author, ignore emails, etc)

It all started out when I wanted to use email to post.

I figured out that editing wp-mail.php, lines 125 and 135 to change “pending” to “publish”.

Tested, and it worked as expected. But it was posting as Admin and not as Me (user # 2).

I then hacked around line 35 from

$post_author = 1;
to
$post_author = 2;

Did the same near lines 82 and 89. Tested again.

Now it posts as Me, but the missing body bug has appeared.

So, here’s what I’m trying to do, fully:

1. email that’s sent to supersecretemailaddress is checked against a list of known addresses (not in the WP database)
2. if a match is found, post is made. If no match is found, discard email.
3. all of those posts are posted as user 2, not 1
4. all text after “special escape character” is discarded (i.e. ditch sigs)

Help?