In fact, I think you need to go the POP3 (/IMAP) route. From the "Hotmail" (/Windows Live/whatever) Service Agreement:

you may not: ...

use any automated process or service to access and/or use the service (such as a BOT, a spider, periodic caching of information stored by Microsoft, or "meta-searching");

(emphasis mine above)

In other words, no scraping allowed. Use the legitimate interfaces and you'll be fine. And you can indeed do this with a Perl (the language) script... generally you run those with perl (the interpreter). What is PERL? I have not heard of this contraption... ;)