Is it possible to query specific items in the AH API?

[Fogyreef]

I'm in the initial brainstorming phase of a guild project. I want to automate the process of receiving items in the mail from guildmates and recording it in Sheets.

My current thought process is to piggyback or duplicate Postal's open all feature, record the sender's name, aggregate their donations. grab the item market values from Tradeskillmaster's WoWuction file and save it to a file that Google Sheets can import.

I can code moderately, but the addon development learning curve is daunting at the moment and I want to get some feedback on the best way to approach the project first. I want to maximize reuse and minimize development time.

What's the best approach to

-siphoning off mail data: Altering Postal? Writing a module Postal uses? or...?
-grabbing the market values for certain items from wowuction's file? Can I query it in game?
-saving that to a text file for importing to Sheets? I haven't come across how addons save to savedvariables yet.


Thanks!

- - - Updated - - -

After some further research I changed my question above. Appreciate any advice.

[SlippyCheeze]

Your questions are sufficiently basic (eg: how do Saved Variables work?) that I direct you to http://wowprogramming.com/ to get started. http://wow.gamepedia.com/Api may also be helpful for "how do I API" questions.