Perl FAQ: How do I send e-mail from a Perl/CGI program on a Unix system?
Question: How do I send e-mail from a Perl/CGI program on a Unix system?
Answer:
Sending e-mail from a Perl CGI program on a Unix computer system is usually pretty simple. Most Perl programs directly invoke the Unix sendmail program. We'll go through a quick example here.
Assuming that you've already have e-mail information you need, such as the send-to address and subject, you can use this sample Perl code to generate and send the e-mail message:
# the rest of your program is up here ... open(MAIL, "|/usr/lib/sendmail -t"); print MAIL "To: $sendToAddress\n"; print MAIL "From: $myEmailAddress\n"; print MAIL "Subject: $subject\n"; print MAIL "This is the message body.\n"; print MAIL "Put your message here in the body.\n"; close (MAIL); # more of your program ...
As you can see from this sample code, sending e-mail from Perl programs on Unix systems is pretty simple. Once you know the "To:", "From:", "Subject:", and message body information, the sending part is very simple!
As a final note, be careful to check the location of the sendmail program on your Unix system. It may be located in different directories on different Unix systems.
Happy coding!
