Yes those three steps accurately describe what I want to do. However, when I say parse e-mail, I mean at a very high level. I just want to extract the From information and some information in the body of the message. The e-mails won't have any attachments. It sounds like I could use Mail::Box to cleanly extract the body of the message and then analyze the content on my own.
Thinking for the future, if I were to setup my own mailserver is it easy to pass the messages to Mail::Box?