How to send an email in Perl
In this shot, we’ll learn how to write a program in Perl to send an email from one id to another.
There are several ways to send an email from different Operating Systems using Perl.
Linux/Unix OS
If you are working on a Linux/Unix PC, there is a sendmail utility in a Perl app through which you can easily send an email to the recipient.
Windows and other OS
Unlike Linux/Unix, there is no utility such as sendmail in Windows through which we can send an email. As an alternative, the Perl module MIME:Lite can be used for client-side email writing. This module can be locally installed on the machine.
Code
Example 01 - Plaintext
Below is a basic syntax for sending an email through Perl:
$to = 'receiver@educative.io';$from = 'sender@educative.io';$subject = 'Sending Plaintext with Perl';$message = 'Test program to send email through Perl!';open(MAIL, "|/usr/sbin/sendmail -t");print MAIL "To: $to\n";print MAIL "From: $from\n";print MAIL "Subject: $subject\n\n";print MAIL $message;$result = close(MAIL);if($result) {print "Email sending success!\n"; }else {print "Email sending failed!\n"; }
Explanation
To ensure that the email is sent successfully, the email server needs to be configured correctly on the host machine’s operating system.
Example 02 - HTML message
Below is another example of sending an email through the Perl program:
$to = 'receiver@educative.io';$from = 'sender@educative.io';$subject = 'Sending HTML message with Perl';$message = '<h1>Hello Sir!</h1><p>How are you doing?</p><p>Hope you received my gifts and letters!</p><p>Do respond to this email.</p><p>Thank you!</p>';open(MAIL, "|/usr/sbin/sendmail -t");print MAIL "To: $to\n";print MAIL "From: $from\n";print MAIL "Subject: $subject\n";print MAIL "Content-type: text/html\n\n";print MAIL $message;close(MAIL);print "Email sent successfully!\n";
Explanation
If we observe closely, the only significant difference between sending a Plaintext and HTML message is the Content-type: text/html\n.
This Content-type specifies that this is an HTML message mail, and the message includes an HTML syntax.
Since HTML has various tags such as: <p>, <h1> to <h6>, <img>, etc. We can include these tags in our HTML message and send attachments with them like images, links/urls, documents.
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