[OT] Importing plain text attachments into Org

[Richard Lawrence <richard.lawrence@berkeley.edu>]

Dear Orgsters,

I'm hoping I can solicit a little advice about pulling email attachments
into Org (via Gnus), since some of the folks on this list seem to have
experience interacting with Gnus from Org.  I realize that the meat of
my question may be better asked on the Gnus list, but if anyone here has
knowledge and/or a similar setup that you'd be willing to share, I would
very much appreciate hearing about it.

The background: I am about to begin teaching a writing-intensive course.
Students will email me their papers every week.  I have no desire to
download, print, and read a bunch of .doc files by hand every week.
(This is a pain, and requires proprietary software I don't have; and I
find 12pt double-spaced Times New Roman much more difficult to read than
a LaTeX article anyway.)  So I am considering asking my students to
email their papers in plain text.  I would like to then apply some
automated processing on my end that would:

1) Download each student's paper into a file in my "teaching" directory.

2) Apply some *very* simple transformations, like adding #+TITLE before
their title, replacing Windows `smart quote' characters with ASCII ` and
', and generally making the files play nice with Org on a GNU box.  I
might also like to do things like run a word count at this stage to make
sure they are within the guidelines for the course.

3) Use Org's export abilities to compile each paper into a PDF (or
perhaps a single PDF for the whole week's submissions).

4) [Not necessary, but would be cool:] Automatically insert TODO items
into my agenda for each paper I have to read; automatically grade
students who don't turn in papers on time; etc.

Does anyone have any ideas about how I might go about this, and whether
it's worth the effort to automate it?  (I will have about 100 papers to
read this semester.)  

Thanks so much!

Best,
Richard