Welcome to PerlMonks! Consider the use of a module for the processing of e-mail. If you are unfamiliar with the concept of modules take a look at http://www.cpan.org/

Also, take a look around PerlMonks. Upon seeing your question I browsed to Code Catacombs where I noticed that one of the monks neilwatson had posted code which splits email messages into their component parts. His code uses several of the MIME modules.

I'm pretty sure that your use of Super Search would turn up code to facilitate word counts.

I'm far from an accomplished Perl coder, but in the few months I've been here, I've learned that being an expert at exploring PerlMonks, can sometimes substitute for being a Perl expert!