Question

Disclosure: I know nothing about Reports or BI. My education was as a DB Admin, and I am a Web Developer by trade, and I am out of my depths, aside from doing this from scratch in code.

So. There is a request in my organization to track and report on e-mails we send to customers. Getting them into a database and Generating an application shouldn't be a problem, but I would like to consider pre-made options for reporting just to be thorough.

Requirements

Open Source or super-cheap($100USD or less)
Generate data based on arbitrary columns(this can be from SQL or something similar)
Charts and Graphs
Data export to CSV
Installs on our servers
PHP-based and MySQL-based
Decently supported

Answer 1

With these requirements your options are very limited, for PHP and open source, you can use PHPJasperXML, which it's an implementation of Jasper Reports for PHP, if you can relax the PHP requirement, you can really tap into the open source world using Jasper Reports (the real deal), Pentaho, Birt, and others.