Automatically & periodically pull email and save attachments

Question

Is there a Linux- or Windows-based program that can automatically & periodically pull email from a POP3/IMAP server, extract the attachment, and save the attachment to disk?

The scenario: We have an email address dedicated to receiving attachments. Currently someone must manually pull in the email, and extract the attachments to a shared folder. But the volume is increasing, and we want to automate the task.

Answer 1

How about using a combination of getmail and munpack on Linux?

I'm thinking that you could set up a cron job to use getmail to download all messages to a maildir mailbox directory and then munpack (perhaps invoked by inotify) to extract the attachments from each message.

I dimly remember reading about reading emails with telnet many years ago - I wonder if it is one of those things somebody with proper Linux knowledge could do with a very simple script.