Perl in a Nutshell, 2nd Edition

Send Email with Net::SMTP

The Simple Mail Transfer Protocol, or SMTP, is responsible for clients negotiating RCPT (“to”) and FROM (“from”) requests with an SMTP server, sending data to the SMTP server, and then sending an end-of-data indicator. Net::SMTP is a subclass of Net::Cmd and IO::Socket::INET that implements an interface to the SMTP and ESMTP protocols. These protocols send mail by talking to an SMTP server through a socket, as described in RFC 821.

When would you want to use Net::SMTP instead of sending mail with an external program? Since socket communications don’t involve spawning an external program, your programs won’t suffer from the overhead associated with running an extra process. Talking to SMTP is convenient for sending a volume of mail messages. Naturally, your server must have an SMTP server running, or a remote mailhost must allow you to talk to it; otherwise, you won’t be able to use this module. That’s when you can turn to Mail::Mailer or Mail::Send and let them provide an interface to an external mail program for you. This is the case, for example, with home computers, which don’t generally run their own SMTP server.