Mail:SendMail Troubleshooting

[digitaldiva]

Hi I am new here and once upon a time I worked with Perl, now I am trying again and need some help:

I wrote a Perl script a few years ago that opened an order entry TXT file and sent each customer with an email address a confirmation email in html or txt. Simple enough and very effective.

Now I am editing this script to send a general email blast on a new computer... I have ActivePerl 5.10.0 Build 1003 installed. I downloaded Mail:Sendmail and put SendMail.pm in C:\Perl\lib\Mai l

First, I have a question about Perl and Mail:SendMail installation:

I am not sure that's all I have to do to install SendMail.pm right. For example, it doesn't show up in the Perl Package Manager from ActivePerl. If I view all packages and go to Mail:SendMail and select Install it warns me: WARNING: Installing Mail-Sendmail-0.79 would downgrade Mail::Sendmail from version 2.09 to 0.79

So I assume that the new version I dropped in lib\Mail 2.09 is installed.

???? right ????

I downloaded a trial version of Komodo IDE 4.4 to do my editing and debugging. Curious, what applications do people here recommend?

I made some edits to the script that basically remove the array looking for order details. My new email blast TXT is a simple tab delimited format: name (tab) email address (eol).

I am getting an error at the SendMail line. Here are some details...

Here's the opening of the file:

use strict; 
use Fcntl; 
use Data::Dumper; 
use Mail::Sendmail; 
use MIME::QuotedPrint; 
use MIME::Base64; 
use HTML::Entities; 

Here are the errors from the debugger:

> Ambiguous use of % resolved as operator % at C:\BasicEmailBlaster.pl line 183. 
 
> Bareword "sendmail" not allowed while "strict subs" in use at C:\BasicEmailBlaster.pl line 183. 
 
> Bareword "mail" not allowed while "strict subs" in use at C:\BasicEmailBlaster.pl line 183. 
 
> Execution of C:\BasicEmailBlaster.pl aborted due to compilation errors. 

Here is the Sub leading up to the Error - Error is on line 183 - the last line below:

sub SendEmail 
{ 
my $bResult = 1; 
 
print "- SENDING CONFIRMATION EMAIL" . "\n"; 
 
my $MAILLOG; 
 
print "- Attempting Open: " . '>> '. $MailLogFile ."\n"; 
 
if ( ! open( MAILLOG, '>> '. $MailLogFile ) ) 
{ 
print "Failed to open Email Log!\n"; 
print "- Attempting Open: " . '>> '. $LogFile ."\n"; 
 
# log error message if not able to log email 
&LogIt("Can't Log Email>>\nCan't Open:\t" . $MailLogFile); 
undef $MAILLOG; 
} 
else 
{ 
$MAILLOG = *MAILLOG; 
} 
 
if ( defined $MAILLOG ) 
{    
print $MAILLOG (">> Mail Entry Start\n"); 
} 
 
if ( !BuildEmail( \%mail ) ) 
{ 
print "Building the Email Failed!\n"; 
if ( defined $MAILLOG ) 
{    
print $MAILLOG (localtime( time ) . "\tBuilding the Email Failed!\n"); 
&LogIt("Building the Email Failed!"); 
} 
$bResult = 0; 
} 
else 
{ 
print "- Attempting Sendmail!\n"; 
 
183     if (sendmail %mail) 
 
This is defining %mail
 
sub BuildEmail
{
    print "- BUILDING CONFIRMATION EMAIL" . "\n";
 
    my $OrderTxt = "";
    my $OrderHtm = "";
    for (my $i = 0; $i < 65; $i++)    
    {
        $OrderTxt.= $EmailArrayTxt[$i];
        $OrderHtm.= $EmailArrayHtm[$i];
    }
 
    my ($MailHash) = shift;
    my %mail = %$MailHash;
    my $boundary = "====" . time() . "====";
 
    $MailHash->{From}    = 'Me <[e-mail]>';
    $MailHash->{To}      = $To;
    $MailHash->{Bcc}     = '[e-mail]';
    $MailHash->{smtp}    = 'mail.mail.com';
    $MailHash->{subject} = "Subjects";
    $MailHash->{'content-type'} = "multipart/alternative; boundary=\"$boundary\"";
 
    local $/;                   # slurp mode (undef)
    local *F;                   # create local filehandle
 
    my $filename = 'C:\EmailBlasts\EmailTemplates\EmailBlast.txt';
 
    print "- Opening $filename\n";
    if ( !open(F, "<$filename") )
    {
        &LogIt("Can't Open:\t" . $filename);
        return 0;    
    }
 
    my $tempText = <F>;         # read whole file
    close(F);                   # ignore retval
 
    $tempText =~ s/%%Order%%/$OrderTxt/eg;
 
    my $plain = encode_qp $tempText;
 
    my $filename = 'C:\EmailBlasts\EmailTemplates\EmailBlast.html';
 
    print "- Opening $filename\n";
    if ( !open(F, "<$filename") )
    {
        &LogIt("Can't Open:\t" . $filename);
        return 0;    
    }
 
    my $tempText = <F>;            # read whole file
    close(F);                   # ignore retval
 
    $tempText =~ s/%%Order%%/$OrderHtm/eg;
 
    my $html = encode_qp $tempText;
 
 
$MailHash->{body} = <<END_OF_BODY;
--$boundary
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
 
$plain
 
--$boundary
Content-Type: text/html; charset="iso-8859-1"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
 
$html
 
--$boundary--
END_OF_BODY
 
}
 

Any Ideas

[digitaldiva]

Okay, I solved my problem by installing the Mail:SendMail 0.79 against PPMs advice. Now I need to add SMTP Authentication to my code. My new server authenticates, how do I do that?

Here's what I have now:

My settings:

$MailHash->{From} = '**@***.com'; 
$MailHash->{To} = $To; 
$MailHash->{Bcc} = '**@***.com'; 
$MailHash->{smtp} = 'mail.mail.com'; 
$MailHash->{subject} = "Newsletter"; 
$MailHash->{'content-type'} = "multipart/alternative; boundary=\"$boundary\"";

[KevinADC]

As suggested on perlguru, you may need to switch to Net::SMTP. The module you are using does not appear to support authentication.

[digitaldiva]

aww you're everywhere. thanks.