Question about storing text and data types.

Hi, I'm trying to produce a script which takes up an incoming email from stdin and saves it to a mysql db amongst other things. I've tried using a BLOB field to store the email body but for some reason this seems to only accept an emaily body up to a certain length (quite small maybe 250 chars) before it crashes my script. Am I using the right data type with BLOB or should I be using something else? No incoming email would be more than 2000 - 3000 characters. When I tried changing the datatype to LONGBLOB my script stopped working at all. The other side issue from this is I'm working completely blind because I, obviously don't get error messages, how can I get my script to email me error messages (like parsing errors etc)? I've found the mysql documentation not as friendly as the php documentation any pointers on some simple tutorials would be great. Any pointers on these issues would be appreciated. Thanks for everyone's help on my previous questions. Allan Goacher