and looking further at the MS example arghh! I guess it would be nice to be able to exec a perl script from the MS Outlook rules, but maybe it would be easier to use Perl to check your mail before letting Outlook have a look?

If you have to run it on the client, maybe use Mail::POP3Client class or something similar to process the remote mail before letting Outlook have a peek?

But then again... you might have issues with keeping ahead of the 5 minute scheduled Outlook downloads...

If I was doing this, I would probably be hooking into the smtp receiving process on the mail server, or have a daemon post-process the users maildirs on the server.

Client mail processing is usually pretty unreliable. Makes me laugh when folks set up Outlook on their PCs to send vacation messages (yes, I know you can get Exchange to do it!) from their PCs... of course the cleaner needs that power-point, and so no vacation messages for three weeks, after the first evening 8-)

What did you have in mind to do with your mail processing that is not covered already in the rules?