Sams Teach Yourself Perl in 24 Hours

A Primer in Internet Mail

Before you can unleash your programming skills on sending email with Perl, you need to know something about how mail works on the Internet.

Before Perl was born, when the Web wasn't even a twinkle in NCSA's eyes and modems were slow, people worldwide communicated using email over a system called UNIX-to-UNIX copy (UUCP). When you sent email under this old system, the local system bundled up your email and forwarded it to the next system in a chain, which bundled up the email and forwarded it on. Each system in the line added a little bit to the message, indicating that it handled the message and then passed it on, as illustrated in Figure 22.1.

Figure 22.1. Handing off mail from system to system.

This method of mail ...