Ah. If you must run your program on unix you have a number of possible options. If by 'Outlook' you mean mail that is being held in the Exchange server and accessed via Outlook, then you can get access to the messages using the module Email::Folder::IMAP. Or if you are really set on going the OLE Automation route (or you are feeling particularly evil) then you could use 4S4C on a Windows machine to expose the appropriate COM interface via SOAP which can then be accessed from any system that you want via SOAP::Lite in your perl program.

/J\