Mail::Sendmail - Simple platform independent mailer
use Mail::Sendmail;
%mail = ( To => 'you@there.com',
From => 'me@here.com',
Message => "This is a very short message"
);
sendmail(%mail) or die $Mail::Sendmail::error;
print "OK. Log says:\n", $Mail::Sendmail::log;
Simple platform independent e-mail from your perl script. Only requires
Perl 5 and a network connection.
Mail::Sendmail takes a hash with the message to send and sends it to your
mail server. It is intended to be very easy to setup and
use. See also FEATURES below, and as usual, read this documentation.
There is also a FAQ (see NOTES).
- Best
-
perl -MCPAN -e "install Mail::Sendmail"
- Traditional
-
perl Makefile.PL
make
make test
make install
- Manual
-
Copy Sendmail.pm to Mail/ in your Perl lib directory.
(eg. c:\Perl\site\lib\Mail\
or /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/Mail/
or whatever it is on your system.
They are listed when you type C< perl -V >)
- ActivePerl's PPM
-
Depending on your PPM version:
ppm install --location=http://alma.ch/perl/ppm Mail-Sendmail
or
ppm install http://alma.ch/perl/ppm/Mail-Sendmail.ppd
But this way you don't get a chance to have a look at other files (Changes,
Todo, test.pl, ...).
At the top of Sendmail.pm, set your default SMTP server(s), unless you specify
it with each message, or want to use the default (localhost).
Install MIME::QuotedPrint. This is not required but strongly recommended.
Automatic time zone detection, Date: header, MIME quoted-printable encoding
(if MIME::QuotedPrint installed), all of which can be overridden.
Bcc: and Cc: support.
Allows real names in From:, To: and Cc: fields
Doesn't send an X-Mailer: header (unless you do), and allows you to send any
header(s) you want.
Configurable retries and use of alternate servers if your mail server is
down
Good plain text error reporting
Experimental support for SMTP AUTHentication
Headers are not encoded, even if they have accented characters.
Since the whole message is in memory, it's not suitable for
sending very big attached files.
The SMTP server has to be set manually in Sendmail.pm or in your script,
unless you have a mail server on localhost.
Doesn't work on OpenVMS, I was told. Cannot test this myself.
- Default SMTP server(s)
-
This is probably all you want to configure. It is usually done through
$mailcfg{smtp}, which you can edit at the top of the Sendmail.pm file.
This is a reference to a list of SMTP servers. You can also set it from
your script:
unshift @{$Mail::Sendmail::mailcfg{'smtp'}} , 'my.mail.server';
Alternatively, you can specify the server in the %mail hash you send
from your script, which will do the same thing:
$mail{smtp} = 'my.mail.server';
A future version will (hopefully) try to set useful defaults for you
during the Makefile.PL.
- Other configuration settings
-
See %mailcfg under DETAILS below for other configuration options.
sendmail is the only thing exported to your namespace by default
sendmail(%mail) || print "Error sending mail: $Mail::Sendmail::error\n";
It takes a hash containing the full message, with keys for all headers
and the body, as well as for some specific options.
It returns 1 on success or 0 on error, and rewrites
$Mail::Sendmail::error and $Mail::Sendmail::log .
Keys are NOT case-sensitive.
The colon after headers is not necessary.
The Body part key can be called 'Body', 'Message' or 'Text'.
The SMTP server key can be called 'Smtp' or 'Server'. If the connection to
this one fails, the other ones in $mailcfg{smtp} will still be tried.
The following headers are added unless you specify them yourself:
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: 'text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"'
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
or (if MIME::QuotedPrint not installed)
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
Date: [string returned by time_to_date()]
If you wish to use an envelope sender address different than the
From: address, set $mail{Sender} in your %mail hash.
The following are not exported by default, but you can still access them
with their full name, or request their export on the use line like in:
use Mail::Sendmail qw(sendmail $address_rx time_to_date);
The following options can be set in your %mail hash. The corresponding keys
will be removed before sending the mail.
- $mail{smtp} or $mail{server}
-
The SMTP server to try first. It will be added
- $mail{port}
-
This option will be removed. To use a non-standard port, set it in your server name:
$mail{server}='my.smtp.server:2525' will try to connect to port 2525 on server my.smtp.server
- $mail{auth}
-
This must be a reference to a hash containg all your authentication options:
$mail{auth} = \%options;
or
$mail{auth} = {user=>``username'', password=>``password'', method=>``DIGEST-MD5'', required=>0 };
- user
-
username
- pass or password
-
password
- method
-
optional method. compared (stripped down) to available methods. If empty, will try all available.
- required
-
optional. defaults to false. If set to true, no delivery will be attempted if
authentication fails. If false or undefined, and authentication fails or is not available, sending is tried without.
(different auth for different servers?)
convert time ( as from time() ) to an RFC 822 compliant string for the
Date header. See also %Mail::Sendmail::mailcfg.
When you don't run with the -w flag, the module sends no errors to
STDERR, but puts anything it has to complain about in here. You should
probably always check if it says something.
A summary that you could write to a log file after each send
A handy regex to recognize e-mail addresses.
A correct regex for valid e-mail addresses was written by one of the judges
in the obfuscated Perl contest... :-) It is quite big. This one is an
attempt to a reasonable compromise, and should accept all real-world
internet style addresses. The domain part is required and comments or
characters that would need to be quoted are not supported.
Example:
$rx = $Mail::Sendmail::address_rx;
if (/$rx/) {
$address=$1;
$user=$2;
$domain=$3;
}
This hash contains installation-wide configuration options. You normally edit it once (if
ever) in Sendmail.pm and forget about it, but you could also access it from
your scripts. For readability, I'll assume you have imported it
(with something like use Mail::Sendmail qw(sendmail %mailcfg) ).
The keys are not case-sensitive: they are all converted to lowercase before
use. Writing $mailcfg{Port} = 2525; is OK: the default $mailcfg{port}
(25) will be deleted and replaced with your new value of 2525.
- $mailcfg{smtp}
-
$mailcfg{smtp} = [qw(localhost my.other.mail.server)];
This is a reference to a list of smtp servers, so if your main server is
down, the module tries the next one. If one of your servers uses a special
port, add it to the server name with a colon in front, to override the
default port (like in my.special.server:2525).
Default: localhost.
- $mailcfg{from}
-
$mailcfg{from} = 'Mailing script me@mydomain.com';
From address used if you don't supply one in your script. Should not be of
type 'user@localhost' since that may not be valid on the recipient's
host.
Default: undefined.
- $mailcfg{mime}
-
$mailcfg{mime} = 1;
Set this to 0 if you don't want any automatic MIME encoding. You normally
don't need this, the module should 'Do the right thing' anyway.
Default: 1;
- $mailcfg{retries}
-
$mailcfg{retries} = 1;
How many times should the connection to the same SMTP server be retried in
case of a failure.
Default: 1;
- $mailcfg{delay}
-
$mailcfg{delay} = 1;
Number of seconds to wait between retries. This delay also happens before
trying the next server in the list, if the retries for the current server
have been exhausted. For CGI scripts, you want few retries and short delays
to return with a results page before the http connection times out. For
unattended scripts, you may want to use many retries and long delays to
have a good chance of your mail being sent even with temporary failures on
your network.
Default: 1 (second);
- $mailcfg{tz}
-
$mailcfg{tz} = '+0800';
Normally, your time zone is set automatically, from the difference between
time() and gmtime() . This allows you to override automatic detection
in cases where your system is confused (such as some Win32 systems in zones
which do not use daylight savings time: see Microsoft KB article Q148681)
Default: undefined (automatic detection at run-time).
- $mailcfg{port}
-
$mailcfg{port} = 25;
Port used when none is specified in the server name.
Default: 25.
- $mailcfg{debug}
-
$mailcfg{debug} = 0;
Prints stuff to STDERR. Current maximum is 6, which prints the whole SMTP
session, except data exceeding 500 bytes.
Default: 0;
The package version number (you can not import this one)
The following global variables were used in version 0.74 for configuration.
As from version 0.78_1, they are not supported anymore.
Use the %mailcfg hash if you need to access the configuration
from your scripts.
- $Mail::Sendmail::default_smtp_server
-
- $Mail::Sendmail::default_smtp_port
-
- $Mail::Sendmail::default_sender
-
- $Mail::Sendmail::TZ
-
- $Mail::Sendmail::connect_retries
-
- $Mail::Sendmail::retry_delay
-
- $Mail::Sendmail::use_MIME
-
use Mail::Sendmail;
print "Testing Mail::Sendmail version $Mail::Sendmail::VERSION\n";
print "Default server: $Mail::Sendmail::mailcfg{smtp}->[0]\n";
print "Default sender: $Mail::Sendmail::mailcfg{from}\n";
%mail = (
#To => 'No to field this time, only Bcc and Cc',
#From => 'not needed, use default',
Bcc => 'Someone <him@there.com>, Someone else her@there.com',
# only addresses are extracted from Bcc, real names disregarded
Cc => 'Yet someone else <xz@whatever.com>',
# Cc will appear in the header. (Bcc will not)
Subject => 'Test message',
'X-Mailer' => "Mail::Sendmail version $Mail::Sendmail::VERSION",
);
$mail{Smtp} = 'special_server.for-this-message-only.domain.com';
$mail{'X-custom'} = 'My custom additionnal header';
$mail{'mESSaGE : '} = "The message key looks terrible, but works.";
# cheat on the date:
$mail{Date} = Mail::Sendmail::time_to_date( time() - 86400 );
if (sendmail %mail) { print "Mail sent OK.\n" }
else { print "Error sending mail: $Mail::Sendmail::error \n" }
print "\n\$Mail::Sendmail::log says:\n", $Mail::Sendmail::log;
Also see http://alma.ch/perl/Mail-Sendmail-FAQ.html for examples
of HTML mail and sending attachments.
Main changes since version 0.79:
Experimental SMTP AUTH support (LOGIN PLAIN CRAM-MD5 DIGEST-MD5)
Fix bug where one refused RCPT TO: would abort everything
send EHLO, and parse response
Better handling of multi-line responses, and better error-messages
Non-conforming line-endings also normalized in headers
Now keeps the Sender header if it was used. Previous versions
only used it for the MAIL FROM: command and deleted it.
See the Changes file for the full history. If you don't have it
because you installed through PPM, you can also find the latest
one on http://alma.ch/perl/scripts/Sendmail/Changes.
MIME::QuotedPrint is used by default on every message if available. It
allows reliable sending of accented characters, and also takes care of
too long lines (which can happen in HTML mails). It is available in the
MIME-Base64 package at http://www.perl.com/CPAN/modules/by-module/MIME/ or
through PPM.
Look at http://alma.ch/perl/Mail-Sendmail-FAQ.html for additional
info (CGI, examples of sending attachments, HTML mail etc...)
You can use this module freely. (Someone complained this is too vague.
So, more precisely: do whatever you want with it, but be warned that
terrible things will happen to you if you use it badly, like for sending
spam, or ...?)
Thanks to the many users who sent me feedback, bug reports, suggestions, etc.
And please excuse me if I forgot to answer your mail. I am not always reliabe
in answering mail. I intend to set up a mailing list soon.
Last revision: 06.02.2003. Latest version should be available on
CPAN: http://www.cpan.org/modules/by-authors/id/M/MI/MIVKOVIC/.
Milivoj Ivkovic <mi\x40alma.ch> (``\x40'' is ``@'' of course)
Copyright (c) 1998-2017 Milivoj Ivkovic. All rights reserved.
This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or
modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.
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