Not having an Ethernet-enabled Arduino board doesn't keep you from connecting your Arduino to the outside world, instead it gives you the opportunity to experiment with other methods of connectivity. This has been demonstrated very well by Ante Vukorepa, who has written the Arduino sketch and also a PHP script to run on a connected PC, which enables serial communication between the Arduino and for this example - the Google mail atom feed to check for unread emails. The mail data, along with time and temperature is then displayed on an LCD module. For a quick demonstration check out the following video:
You can find the Arduino sketch here, and the PHP/server side code from here. And for more, we're on twitter and Google+, so follow us for news and product updates as well.
If you're interested in adding an LCD to your Arduino-based projects - save time and move forward with the Freetronics LCD & Keypad shield which contains a bright 16x2 character LCD and five buttons that can be read from only one analogue input pin:
