piping messages to external scripts

[Culley Harrelson <harrelson@xxxxxxxxx>]

I would like to set customize mutt for my tech support email for my business.
I have a bunch of shell scripts that do things like looking up accounts,
changing account statuses, issuing refunds, looking up payments etc.  In
general, the key used for looking up accounts is the email address (though
not necessarily the from address in a given message).  So, what I would like
to do is create a program similar to urlview that will parse out all the
email addresses in a message, let you select one and then pipe that email
address into any number of scripts script and view the results.  Ideal would
be a second list of scripts to execute, again a la urlview.

I am ready to tackle this problem but when you pipe a message to a script it
looks like a new process is spawned and the new process can't remain in
control of the terminal.  Can anyone point me in the right direction to make
this happen?

culley