Gurus, namaste! :)

I'm trying to set up a browseable archive based on a single 50+MB mailbox. The few apps I've seen that do anything like that generally use techniques from the pre-dawn of history: breaking up the mbox into a gazillion tiny little files and then laboriously creating the "Previous/Next message", "Previous/Next thread" link structure by hacking at the file/directory structure (with an axe, as I recall, but I may be mistaken.)

From the other end, though (i.e., posts here talking about building webmail progs), I'm running into a maze of hypercomplexity. I mean, really - Catalyst? HTML::Mason? A large pile of Mail::* modules? That's more about a big, complete mail app - and all I really want to do is a) index a big mbox, and b) show a nice interface to the users that lets them read the individual emails and walk the structure in a simple, convenient way. Maybe throw in a regex-based search engine, too.

Meanwhile, I'm having a problem coming up with a good approach for this. Load it in a DB and use SQL to query the thing? Build a file of pointers into the file and reindex it every time I add something to the archive? 'tie'? 'dbmopen'? I've chased myself into a corner, here, and can't see a sensible way out. :(

So, does anyone know of such a program (preferably one written in Perl), or have some relatively simple approach to putting this together? I'd really appreciate a helping hand.