Regarding the low load & Valentine: Good point. I hadn't thought about either Valentine holidays or religious types

Well, we'll just have to see what happens. However, before designing and implementing a server that could handle 100's of games, I would still like to see whether there is demand for 10's of games :-)
Cute idea with "order" file and a "fulfillment" cron job. That seems better secured than using sudo
Mysql has some nice & easy security feautures that I like

But as you say, each to their own. You can certainly do anything ýou can do with databases with files, and it' seasier to do mail<->file than mail<->db.
An objective description of the SQL language would be an epithet

At least the interface between Perl and Mysql is better than say C/C++ and DB/2.
Thanks for your interest... the chocolates are going through a 2nd cooling now.. next comes the bottom, and then it's back to coding
