So I went out on the net and found one. Actually, I found three or four. I used pop-perl for a while, but it was missing what seemed an obvious feature, the ability to hack the addresses on fetched mail so replies would work properly. This was clearly something the computer ought to be doing for me. Every good work of software starts by scratching a developer's personal itch.
Good programmers know what to write.
While I don't claim to be a great programmer, I try to imitate one. An important trait of the great ones is constructive laziness. They know that you get an A not for effort but for results, and that it's almost always easier to start from a good partial solution than from nothing at all. Linus, for example, didn't actually try to write Linux from scratch. Instead, he started by reusing code and ideas from Minix, a tiny Unix-like OS for 386 machines.