Hello all. My company is in the process of building an order database and we are researching ways to automate adding orders to the database. Details aside, we would like to explore ways of parsing emails that are autogenerated when an order is placed to gather critical information (order #, name, etc.).

I really have no idea where to begin with this, but since we have several linux boxes that are running 24/7, I figured it would be a good idea to have something running on one of them.

Emails are always in a standard format and parsing them into XML or some other format would be ideal. I'm not sure where to even start looking, so if anyone has some ideas or could point me in the right direction, it would be helpful. Thanks.

Can you get a hold on Linux Magazine - a really good source for your linux computing, configuring, etc needs, they had in Spring/Summer issues Ruby discussions, unfortunatelly I've moved and it is a mess here, can't find my archives. Also perl is a very powerfull text parsing and analizing language and not only text parsing. Regex, perl, ruby are the keywords here.