Perl: Read email and use message content as stdin for an excel update - excel

Question

I am looking for some help with starting a Perl script. I'm relatively inexperienced with Perl so help would be appreciated :)
Basically, want to start a project to write a script that helps keep up to date with hours I have been working. Basically I would like the script to E-mail (automated using cron) me reminding me to send my hours each day, then I send an e-mail back with the message as something like
"03/02/14 7.30 18.30"
The script will then read the data and update an excel spreadsheet keeping a log of hours.
I know how to do everything except having the script read an e-mail. I have been doing research into MIME::* MAIL::* but I'm not entirely sure which package would be the best and how to actually go about it.

Answer 1

As #mpapec suggested you could read email using IMAP or a local mailbox on a linux box.
In windows you could use OLE and read emails in an outlook: Perl: Win32::OLE and Microsoft Outlook - Iterating through email attachments efficiently
You could read emails on exchange in this way: http://metacpan.org/pod/Email::Folder::Exchange
If I were you I would use IMAP to access emails. It is platform independent and not too hard to use (I used it in the past and it was reliable).
http://metacpan.org/pod/Net::IMAP::Client
my $imap = Net::IMAP::Client->new(
server => 'mail.you.com',
user => 'USERID',
pass => 'PASSWORD');
# select folder
$imap->select('INBOX');
#newest first
my $messages = $imap->search({
FROM => 'you',
SUBJECT => 'your email subjet',
}, [ '^DATE' ]);
# fetch full message (newest)
my $data = $imap->get_rfc822_body($messages->[0]);
#process
store_data_in_excel($data);
#move to archive
$imap->copy([$messages->[0]], 'Archive');
$imap->add_flags(\#msg_ids, '\\Deleted');
$imap->expunge;