Setting email headers with perl

Question

I'm trying to set some email headers when sending email in perl. I have the following code, however the Content-Type and X-Priority get sent in the body of the message. The following is my code.

my $sendmail = "| /usr/sbin/sendmail -t";

open(MAIL,$sendmail)
        or die("Unable to open sendmail.  $!");
print MAIL "Reply-to: $reply\n";
print MAIL "From: $from\n";
print MAIL "To: $to\n";
print MAIL "Subject: $subject\n\n";
print MAIL "Content-Type: text/plain\n";
print MAIL "X-Priority: 1\n";
print MAIL "blah\n";
print MAIL "$link\n\n";
close(MAIL);

I'm using sendmail as I'd like something out of the box without having to bother to install anything additional.

Answer 1

Remove second "\n" from the line below. Sendmail treat first empty line as "end of headers".

print MAIL "Subject: $subject\n\n";

Additional fixes:

• add -i command line options to avoid special treatment of lines starting with dot
• specify recipients as command line arguments passed to sendmail after -- command line option
• check sendmail exit code as returned by close
• use single print with "here document"

---

print MAIL <<"END_OF_MESSAGE";
Reply-to: $reply
From: $from
To: $to
Subject: $subject
X-Priority: 1

blah blah blah
$link
END_OF_MESSAGE

Answer 2

Your actual error is that you put \n\n after the subject. That ends the header and starts the body.

You really should use Net::SMTP which comes with almost all Perl distributions. This way, you're not dependent upon the behavior of sendmail.

The Net::SMTP module is fairly simple to use too. A lot of people don't like it because it's a bit too close to the raw protocol. A lot of people prefer something like Mail::Sendmail, but that's not part of Perl's standard distribution.