Thank you all for your suggestions. The idea to modify lib/RT/Interface/Email.pm is the direction that the last person who did this took, sounds like they had success. (Look in the message body for ticket ids - #3 by geraldsnm) unfortunately, those modifications don’t work with RT4 (the last published code was for RT3 quite some time ago).
I’m currently investigating the fetchmail option, if I can parse the message in a script and insert the ticket # into the subject via script prior to inputting the message into RT that would definitely do the trick! It just seems like something the RT Dev’s’ would want to do for RT itself in general, as parsing the subject (only) seems to be a holdover from much slower computational days since i can grep a 100M File in a second the policy of only checking subject seems outdated. I just thought this may be an improvement that RT could benefit from as a whole.
If I come into any luck with modifying the message (pre-RT) I’ll post my script source here.
Thanks again for the responses/suggestions/etc.