newbie question - handling email addresses

Hi, I'm 100% new to Perl but I've been given a project with it anyway,
so I have some pretty basic questions.
The script is used to process a form submitted in PHP.  I have it
working fine, but I need to add an email address field now.  i was
told that Perl doesn't like the "@" character (which makes sense), and
I know that I could use the backslash, but does Perl treat the
submitted field as an object, or will I have to add some functionality
which adds the backslashes before the form is submitted to the Perl?
Basically, do I need to even worry about the @ symbol if I'm working
with the submitted form fields in Perl, or will the @ still crash the
script?
Thanks.
Munz