You need to specify what you are doing with the email address.

Are you currently using Perl to retrieve the address from the DB? If so, show your code that retrieves it, and the code that immediately follows the retrieval. It should be trivial to change after retrieving the address, or in most cases, on the fly before it's even stored into a variable.

If you're not using Perl and are just asking a theoretical question, you'll need to specify your intended application.

Steve