I know your problem. Whenever I'm not at my own machine, I log in to my server with ssh and read my mail with PINE. I mostly read my email at home though, so I just view images with qiv, but when you always have to export the attachments to your web directory, automating that task would be usefull. The problem with your approach is that it's not much faster (read: takes as much effort) as just saving the attachment straight away (hit ">", then select the attachment and hit "s"). So yes, in your case, I'd probably go for procmail. And you don't need to ditch Perl at all, you can call Perl scripts from procmail too! :)

Oh and for viewing MS Word documents, see if you like antiword ;-)