Advice for Email Parsing & Forwarding

Hello All,

I am faced with the need to parse and forward emails from a datalogger.
I would like advice on how to go about doing the following:

Emails will arrive on a IPOWER Webserver (discount web hosting service)
with a simple text file attachment of 10-20 characters. I would like to
parse some of the text out of the original body and add the text from
the attached file to the forwarded body.

What is the best way to tackle this? (I would like for the solution to
reside on the server for reliability.) Any suggestions, pointers,
reading material, etc. would be greatly appreciated.

John