Olimax did a web board using a pic I think. I use silicon labs boards for internet stuff, or the R PI. TBH the PI makes the job pretty simple, but I would strongly suggest taking the donkey work away from the SD card and using a USB stick for the file system, or even hooking a hard drive to it.
Might just be me but I destroy SD cards with the Pi pretty quickly. As said above email can be a nightmare, you can get pretty cheap text services though. Considering how popular the PI is, not that many really good books on it, and not many really useful projects published.