Yes, yes, it's entirely possible with Perl.

There are two options. You could write a simple daemon (to run at all times) to monitor a POP email account. Or you could have a script run at scheduled times (via crontab) to do the same thing.

If a certain email message is detected, you can do whatever your soul wishes, really. There's a number of modules that you could find on CPAN that will help you check a POP account from your script, parse messages, etc.

Your script may look as simple as this (read inline comments for more info): 
use Mail::POP3Client;
  
$pop = new Mail::POP3Client( USER     => "me",
                   PASSWORD => "mypassword",
                   HOST     => "pop3.do.main" );

my $specific_email_subject = "Parse by script";
my $parser_script = "email_parse.pl";

for ($i = 1; $i <= $pop->Count(); $i++) {
  foreach ( $pop->Head($i) ) {
    if (/^Subject:\s+($specific_email_subject)/i) {
      # Special email detected!!!
      # open a 'pipe' to the script that will parse/process 
      # this email message body.
      open(PARSER,">$parser_script |");

      # send email body to the script (will receive
      # it via STDIN
      print PARSER $pop->Body($i);

      # close pipe (end 'transmission')
      close(PARSER);
    }
  }
}

[download]
(note: not tested).

UPDATE: added the sample script.

_____________________

signature is under repair

In reply to Re: call a script via an email by vladb
in thread call a script via an email by Anonymous Monk

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.