Way To Parse Information From Email To Database

I have an email account that receives various requests to get free materials, for different items. These emails will usually contain name, item, quantity of item, address, state, zip. What makes it difficult is that all the emails are different, unstructured, and the data is usually buried in the emails, i.e. a forwarded email.I want a way to get all the information and parse it into a ms sql database.I know there are products that would work really well like url... but at work we can't afford this.I was thinking of creating a webservice that would input mail data posted from a third party site like cloudmail.com into a secondary website and then maybe creating a ruby script that would crawl the messages and extract addresses, etc. Anyone know of a good, simple alternative, a custom script in ruby, php, vb.net or possibly an open source solution?