June 2000
Intermediate to advanced
470 pages
14h 14m
English
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Chapter 9. Sending Email
One of the most common tasks your CGI scripts need to perform is sending email. Email is a popular method for exchanging information between people, whether that information comes from other people or from automated systems. You may need to send email updates or receipts to visitors of your web site. You may need to notify members of your organization about certain events like a purchase, a request for information, or feedback about your web site. Email is also a useful tool to notify you when there are problems with your CGI scripts. When you write subroutines that respond to errors in your CGI scripts, it is a very good idea to include code to notify whomever is responsible for maintaining the site about the error.
There are several ways to send email from an application, including using an external mail client, such as sendmail or mail, or by directly communicating with the remote mail server via Perl. There are also Perl modules that make sending mail especially easy. We’ll explore all these options in this chapter by building a sample application that provides a web front end to an emailer.
Security
Since the subject of security is still fresh in our minds, however, we should take a moment to review security as it relates to email. Sending email is probably one of the largest causes of security errors in CGI scripts.
Mailers and Shells
Most CGI scripts open a pipe to an external mail client such as sendmail and mail, and pass the email address through ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
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I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.