Saving sender name

What I want to do is take the senders name from an incoming email and add
it to an existing list.
Trouble is I have found nothing that has given me any idea where to start
with this.  I need to make a pretty generic recipie that can take no
matter what kind of mail I recieve.  Meaning I have no idea if the
incoming mail will have From:, X-Sender:, or what.
But I want to be able to know who is requseting certain files.
Can anyone help??

Bishop