Favorite email parser?

From: Brian Gerard (blists_at_technobrat.com)
Date: 06/30/04

  • Next message: Brian Gerard: "Re: Favorite email parser?" 
    Date: Tue, 29 Jun 2004 15:46:41 -0700
To: Perls of Wisdom <beginners@perl.org>

    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

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