Hi all-

I'm about to start a project that goes a little something like this...

Right now, alerts get automatically emailed to a central address which due
to the volume is largely ignored.  You know the drill: "Ooo! It would be
great if we got notified when resource X is running low!  Then we could
anticipate the need for it and get ahead of the game."  Repeat for resources
A-Z, AA-ZZ, etc, etc and you get a mailbox that quickly becomes filled with
alerts that no one reads, largely due to the fact that the reading alone
would be a full time job.  We can receive anywhere from a couple of hundred
to a couple of thousand of these per day.

So I'm planning to set up the address to forward to a backline server, where
my Brilliantly Written(tm) perl script will crunch said alerts.  I'd like it
to chop them up into little bits and insert the bits into an
intelligently-structured database of some sort.  I'm planning on Postgres at
this point.

Then there will be another script, available to the proper people via an
internal website, where queries can be made against the database according to
a yet-to-be-designed web interface.  The main thing I want is a simplification
of the alert viewing.  So you might see "3245 instances of alert Y", which
could be drilled down into based on various criteria, rather than the first
page (out of 65) of 50 alerts all of the same type.  Statistical trending and
other such pie-chart-able things may show up in the future, but not for now.

So my questions are these:

1) Does this sound like a reasonable approach to the problem, given the
relatively low amount of detail I've provided?  Anyone dealt with this type of
thing before and have any gotchas for me?

2) From what I've read, Postgres beats MySQL performance-wise, which is why I
chose it, but IANADBA.  Any votes on a free DB to use for this?  Obviously, it
needs to have a perl interface or CPAN module available.  Regardless of which
DB you like, what's your favorite module for interacting with it?  ...and,
umm, if you could point me to any "Getting Started" docs, that would be just
lovely.  <:)

3) Which module would you suggest for parsing email?  There are a few of them
out there, and I really don't have the time to try each one out until I find
the one I like the best.  :)

Answers to any or all of the above gratefully received!

aTdHvAaNnKcSe-
Brian


  /~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~\
 | Brian Gerard                  O'Reilly is to a system administrator    |
 | First initial + 'lists'               as a shoulder length             |
 | at technobrat dot com           latex glove is to a veterinarian.      |
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