On 08/04/2011 03:20 AM, Todd wrote: > Hi John, > > what are you doing with this email when you recieve it, beyond just > saving it? > > > I plan to analysis the mail to group into e-mails on the same topic and > create a comprehensive answer to the topics. Along the lines of a FAQ > for topics that are continually being asked over and over as well as > more advanced, obscure topics that people may want to chime into. > > If I had $500 to spend, not counting money for hard disks, could I even > get a machine for that? or do I really need to be scraping more cash > together? > -Jason From what was stated previously by RPH where he did the breakdown and shared his 750k/day experience, I'd say you could easily afford to build a system yourself minus the drives. Your problem may be affording the bandwidth to sustain the experiment, depending on where you live (here in Japan fat bandwidth is cheap, but we have trouble connecting to some specific places at high speeds sometimes, for example -- but domestically it is really amazing). Of course, that addresses receipt of the messages, what sort of computer would be required to do the parsing and scanning in realtime, on the other hand, depends entirely on the sort of routines you want run. The cheap route is to collect cheaply over a period and stock the messages, and then switch to processing the collected data with whatever resources you have available once you've hit the point of diminishing returns on whatever storage solution you wind up building. In this way you can afford cheap processors if you are willing to pay in time instead of cash. -Iwao PS: Of course, if you don't mind dealing with dodgy Russians you could probably find a sponsor for just such an effort...