The reason 'why' is because I really expected there to be a Perl version as there is no good reason someone wouldn't have tried anything similar before.

As you say, the protocols are well-defined and so building to their specification shouldn't involve too much hunting round for obscure exceptions.

The C implementations are great providing you're doing what it's intended to do (ie. serve mail from a static file), but I do tend to view CPAN as a wonderful resource for getting simple-to-use implementations of common protocols and I do view POP3 as an exceptionally common one. There are also very fast C implementations of things such as web servers, but I'd expect Perl to have it's own modules to handle raw HTTP requests.

I did find references of an entire POP3 server implemented in Perl, but at the time couldn't find it, so I do know people have tried things like this in the past.

Thanks for the pointers to the WML/WAP modules. I can see these would suit for many needs, but for this I do need to be able to keep data in long-term storage until the user deletes it, as part of the project is intended to provide an offline browser of sorts.