Remote administartion via email

[celejar]

I'm looking for an application to do remote administration of my Debian box via email. The app should read mail (presumably authenticating via pgp / gpg keys) and execute commands contained therein. The box connects to the internet intermittently to download mail, but does not have a persistent connection so I can't use ssh or webmin. I have googled but not found anything. I suppose it would be straightforward to do this with Perl or even shell scripting, but I don't have much experience with either, and as I assume someone has already done this, why reinvent the wheel? In addition to my situation, such an application would also be useful for managing a system from clients such as cell phones or email capable pagers.