Perl in a Nutshell, 2nd Edition

Send Email with Mail::Mailer

The Mail::Mailer module interacts with external mail programs. When you use Mail::Mailer or create a new Mail::Mailer object, you can specify which mail program you want your program to talk to:

use Mail::Mailer qw(mail);

Another way to specify the mailer is:

use Mail::Mailer;
$type = 'sendmail';
$mailprog = Mail::Mailer->new($type);

in which $type is the mail program. Once you’ve created a new object, use the open function to send the message headers to the mail program as a hash of key/value pairs, in which each key represents a header type, and the value is the value of that header:

# Mail headers to use in the message
%headers = (
    'To' => '[e-mail]',
    'From' => '[e-mail]',
    'Subject' => 'working?'
);

This code represents headers in which the recipient of the mail message is [e-mail], the mail was sent from [e-mail], and the subject of the mail message is working?.

Once %headers has been defined, it is passed to open:

$mailprog->open(\%headers);

You then send the body of the message to the mail program:

print $mailprog "This is the message body.\n";

Close the program when the message is finished:

$mailprog->close;

A practical example of using Mail::Mailer might be a command line-driven application that works much like the Unix mail program, either reading STDIN until end-of-file or mailing a file specified on the command line.

Mail::Mailer uses the environment variable PERL_MAILERS to augment or modify the built-in ...