SMTP client.

[Punto]

Hi..

I need to sendn a mail from a perl script. I'm using MIME::Entity to create the e-mail, so I have a string like this to print out to sendmail:

To: [e-mail]
From: [e-mail]
etc

But I want to use the script on a system that doesn't have sendmail, or maybe use a different SMTP server, other than localhost. I need to use MIME::Entity because I'm sending attachments. What would be another way to send the e-mails? I say Mail::Sendmail and Net::SMTP, but they all have commands like this:

$mail = {To => '[e-mail]',
         From => '[e-mail]',
         etc

or something, but I alredy have all the mail on a string. Any ideas?

thanks..

[lhoward]

Using <cpan://Net::SMTP> will work fine. It is the nature of internet e-mail that you set the from and to twice if you do raw SMTP; once in the e-mail header and once in the SMTP session. There's a good O'Reilly book Programming Internet Email that goes into all the nasty details of this stuff.

Here's an example from a piece of my code. In this case I uses MIME::Lite to do the actual encoding, but the process should be the same with MIME::Entity. I've removes the error checking in the Net::SMTP communication to make the code smaller and easier to post; you should add the error checking back if you plan to use Net::SMTP. One other note is that MIME::Lite has its own send method that will send the message. So unless you need (or want) to do the SMTP negotiation yourself, MIME::Lite may be an easier solution for you as it can encode, add attachments and send the message.

use Net::SMTP;
use MIME::Lite;

my $from='[e-mail]';
my $to='[e-mail]'

my $msg_html_rich = new MIME::Lite(
   From    => $from,
   Subject => 'MIME::Lite Test',
   To      => $to,
   Type    => 'multipart/alternative');
attach $msg_html_rich
   Type     =>'text/plain',
   Data     =>'message in plain text';
attach $msg_html_rich
   Type     =>'text/html',
   Data     =>'message in <b>HTML</b> with <i>many</i> markup tags';

my $smtp= Net::SMTP->new('127.0.0.1',
                Timeout => 180);
$smtp->mail($from);
$smtp->to($to);
$smtp->data();
$smtp->datasend($msg_html_rich->as_string);
$smtp->dataend();

[httptech]

If your system doesn't have sendmail, it's probably got some other MTA which could possibly emulate sendmail's "-t" option.

If you are wanting to send mail to another SMTP server aside from localhost, you are going to have to talk the SMTP protocol in your script, or write a script to act like sendmail -t, and pass the message off to it.

The best solution really depends on your situation; what platform are you dealing with, and what are your choices for sending mail locally? Sending through a remote SMTP server would be my last choice.

[ZZamboni]

You could try looking at both Mail::Internet and Mail::Mailer. The latter allows sending mail using different methods, may be what you want. The former allows composing and manipulating mail messages, including parsing from a string, so you could parse your existing string to extract the corresponding headers. Although if you are building the message in the first place, you may already have them handy.

--ZZamboni

[Anonymous Monk]

If you are running on an NT box you may wish to try the freeware SMTP client blat at http://gepasi.dbs.aber.ac.uk/softw/Blat.html. We use blat with Perl with excellent results. You must have mail relay privileges on the SMTP server.