Now all I need to do is convince my lab to install SVN so that I can play around with it....

Good luck with that. :)

One thing you might consider is sending the email only on failure; successful builds succeed quietly. I've played around with a few "email-a-day" scripts (mostly of my own devising), and I find that even at such a low frequency, after a few weeks of the same (or similar) messages I tend to delete them unread. Parsing the tests' output might be more effort than it's worth; can you simply assume that the build succeeded if $stderr is empty?

I don't know about that, but it's a very good idea to do some investigating. With Test::More at least, using the verbose flag causes output to go to $stderr even if the tests are successful. This complicates things if you want verbose testing. Of course, there's dozens of other test modules out there, so... it may be possible to use one of those instead.

Shameless self-promotion

I personally don't see anything wrong with these, so long as they provide useful information.