Others in this node have outlined the technique, but I'd like to present the concept in the context of a working example:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use strict;
use Data::Dumper qw(Dumper);

my %hash;

while (my $line = <DATA>) {
  next unless my ($id, @row) =
    $line =~ /^(\d+) (\w+) (\S+) (\w+) (\w+)$/;

  @{$hash{$id}}{qw(name email title date)} = @row;
}

print Dumper(\%hash);

__DATA__
1 merlyn merlyn@perlmonks.org saint today
2 tilly tilly@perlmonks.org saint today
3 tye tye@perlmonks.org saint today
4 jcwren jcwren@perlmonks.org saint today
[download]

This will iterate over the file handle, and attempt to match the $line with a regex. (You'll note that I changed the regex slightly to work with the data) If there is no match, then it will skip over the line. If there is a match, it will assign to a hash slice underneath $hash{$id}. It's the equivalent of:

my %hash;

my %account;
@account{ qw(name email title date) } = @row;

$hash{$id} = \%account;
[download]

One advantage of the first example is that you are doing it in a single step, without using any 'Synthetic' Code.