So I deduce that either MIME::Lite has a bug (extremely unlikely)

Well, actually extremely is a bit stronger than I would say. Eryq is human, and so am I. In fact the whole reason I took over maintenance of the module was _because_ MIME::Lite had an error in it and Eryq didnt have the tuits to take care of it, so there was this buggy version in wide use. The 3.0 release was mostly a cosmetic change (with a few minor changes), the 3.01 release is the one to use. (Although I would be very grateful for people trying out the dev release of 3.01_03 especially if they are using authenticating SMTP servers for transmission, I wont release it with a "production" version number until I have feedback.)

But you are correct, MIME::Lite does try to use a bunch of modules and then falls back to roll-yer-own stuff if it cant find them. (Not my call, I probably wouldnt have done it that way myself, *shrug*) But you _shouldnt_ have been seeing the errors you did. Which is why i assume there is something strange about your setup. Please feel free to email me with more details so i can look into it closer if you do continue to experience problems. But please ensure you upgrade and check the various bits and bobs are up to date first. Also dont forget to send me your perl version, OS version and version of the module itself and any of the other modules that MIME::Lite uses.