Something else you might want to take a look at is Pop Tray. I use this at work to notify me when I have e-mail and I can just delete the spam from there rather than download it all.

The bonus is that, besides being free, the source code is available for download so you can see what the author did. Granted it is in Delphi, but you have a leg up to study if you do decide to write your own in Perl.

Hope that helps!