CGI Programming with Perl, 2nd Edition

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 ...