Sending mail with Perl mail script

by nixCraft on January 20, 2006 · 22 comments· last updated at May 28, 2008

Q. How can I send an email with perl?

A. With the help of sendmail you can send an email from your web based feedback form. You will need to indicate the path to the mail program, Sendmail. Usually the path to Sendmail is /usr/sbin/sendmail. Here is sample script that can send an email to your account or to end user. Make sure you setup

$to='MAIL ADDRESS TO SEND TO';
$from= 'EMAIL@MYOMAIN.COM';
$subject='YOUR SUBJECT';

Here is sample script to sending an email using perl [ Download script ]:

#!/usr/bin/perl
print "Content-type: text/html\n\n";
 
$title='Perl Mail demo';
$to='MAIL ADDRESS TO SEND TO';
$from= 'webmaster@YOURDOMAIN.COM';
$subject='YOUR SUBJECT';
 
open(MAIL, "|/usr/sbin/sendmail -t");
 
## Mail Header
print MAIL "To: $to\n";
print MAIL "From: $from\n";
print MAIL "Subject: $subject\n\n";
## Mail Body
print MAIL "This is a test message from Cyberciti.biz! You can write your
mail body text here\n";
 
close(MAIL);
 
print "<html><head><title>$title</title></head>\n<body>\n\n";
 
## HTML content sent, let use know we sent an email
print "<h1>$title</h1><p>A message has been sent from $from to $to</p></body></html>";

Upload script Upload script to your web hosting cgi-bin directory. Then test is by typing url. For example http://mydomain.com/cgi-bin/sendmail.pl.

Caution: Notice that the subject line in the above script ends with two \n (new line) characters. These characters are required to separate the email header from the email body with a blank line. Do not remove them.

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{ 22 comments… read them below or add one }

1 Frank Wiles May 31, 2007 at 4:44 pm

I’d suggest not using Sendmail directly, but instead using a module like MIME::Lite::TT or MIME::Lite::TT::HTML for lots of various reasons.

I put together a small howto for using those modules at:
http://www.revsys.com/writings/perl/sending-email-with-perl.html

2 javier villarca cao September 13, 2007 at 2:33 pm

thanks for the perl code… It really helped me a lot. After experimenting on at least a dozen codes and techniques, your code, though simple as it is, made my routine work… Thanks again
Javier

3 hamsinv September 16, 2008 at 6:07 am

Hello Vivck,

Good one. Could you please clarify if this code compatible with Rad hat and SUSE.

4 vivek September 16, 2008 at 6:26 am

Perl is cross platform scripting language i.e. it should work under any UNIX like operating system.

5 Abhishek January 8, 2009 at 10:57 am

Thanks a lot for this script.. i think this could be the simplest script..

Thanks again :)

6 Vipin February 25, 2009 at 12:21 pm

The code which is above is good I have one doubt in that How to send mail to multiple
mail address

7 Austin February 26, 2009 at 9:02 pm

Vipin

I believe you just have add multiple emails with comma at the end of each address.

$to = “,address2,address3,…..”

Austin

8 Eric May 18, 2009 at 9:21 pm

this should work great, but i am having trouble finding any email servers that would offer a cgi-bin for you to access…

could you recommend any?

9 Rajiv July 3, 2009 at 4:23 am

This scripts is OK if you just need test how things work. If you need to send mails to a lot of people, then you need to look at many other aspects (correct headers, spf records etc.) so that your domain or IP does not end up in e-mail black lists.

If you are a webmaster and plan to send large number of e-mails from scripts, you need to do a bit of a home work.

10 Abhijeet August 24, 2009 at 9:08 pm

Sear sir i am not able to use the mail() of php of my yahoo small nusiness hosting kindly help

11 Daniel October 1, 2009 at 10:41 pm

This is simplest, and most effective script for sending a simple mail. I wonder if it can expand to more for HTML, Attatchment, Reply etc…

12 NMarcu October 6, 2009 at 9:48 am

Hello all,

Have somebody a perl script with postfix?

13 Sandip October 26, 2009 at 11:32 am

Can this be modified to work in Windows in an Outlook MS/Exchange environment? If so, how?

14 Nadeem Gul November 13, 2009 at 12:39 am

Its quite simple and handy.

Can someone tell me how do to send attachment using this script?

Thanks,

15 Srinidhi January 19, 2010 at 11:07 am

looks good…

can you tell me if I can get a pearl script for loging on to a public mail server with my login ID and pass word and forward it to an other mail account?

16 Davidmoreen March 29, 2010 at 4:07 am

Great job, worked the first time!

17 Nisha Babu June 9, 2010 at 3:59 pm: Could you please provide me a perl script to download a file from mail attachment.
Thanks,
Nisha
Reply

18 Soundar December 5, 2010 at 7:35 am

hi, how i define SMTP server addess ? basically i wanted to send a mail after success of my cron job with log.

19 priyanka November 23, 2011 at 11:14 am

can anyone help me out .. i m begineer with perl… i need to send a mail but getting errors related to smpt server n port number….
my email id : priyankapagaria89@gmail.com

20 Umesh April 19, 2012 at 6:25 am