Any help would be much appreciated,
I am new to arduino, but I have some (a wee bit) of programming experience. My project is to sample data (flow meter every sec.) store this data on an SD card, then send it to an email account (SMTP). Im thinking that i can use an arduino UNO. Is there any way to count pulses and and email data at the same time?? is there a seperate hardware component that can be used to count pulses?
Yes. Counter/Timer1 has a counter mode. You can set the counter to increment on rising edges or falling edges of the T1 pin (a.k.a. PORTD pin 6, or Arduino Pin 6).
Gotcha, I came up with a method of using an UNO just for counting pulses (undisturbed from sending emails and cheaper than a pulse counter) and using another arduino to request the pulse counts, do arithmetic, and send email. Does this sounds like an efficient method? 
You shouldn't need to use two arduinos for that, since it supports interrupts.