Thanks;
Fletch I incorporated a couple of your ideas. I also didn't realize you can do the do blocks in perl, very helpful.
Also Moritz thanks I didn't realize, you can use a complex regex in the splits, nice to know.
The code was changed adding:

  
foreach my $entry ( split( /;/, $file_data ) ) {
    do { s/^\s+//; s/\s+$//; }
      for $entry;
    push @email_list, $entry;
}
print join( "\n", sort(@email_list)), "\n";
[download]

Thanks again.