G'day perlpearls,

Welcome to the monastery.

I agree with derby's comments above. I was interested to see how this might be achieved with MIME::Lite so I ran some tests. Having now seen your subsequent response, I realise that this isn't what you were after; however, someone might find it useful.

Here's my test code:

$ perl -Mstrict -Mwarnings -e '
    use utf8;
    use MIME::Lite;
    package MIME::Lite::IO_Handle {
        no warnings "redefine";
        sub print {
            my $self = shift;
            binmode $$self => ":utf8";
            print {$$self} @_;
        }
    };
    MIME::Lite::->new(
        To => "ken",
        From => "ken",
        Type => "text/plain; charset=utf8",
        Subject => "\x{263a} Happy days!",
        Data => "Testing 1 2 3",
    )->send;
'
[download]

Notes:

• use utf8; — because there's a Unicode character in the source code.
• package MIME::Lite::IO_Handle { ... } — to deal with message "Wide character in print at /.../MIME/Lite.pm line 3164 ...". The only change to the original method is the addition of binmode $$self => ":utf8";.
• \x{263a} — that's a smiley face. (The sad face \x{2639} also worked.)

Here's the mail that arrived:

$ mail
Mail version 8.1 6/6/93.  Type ? for help.
"/var/mail/ken": 1 message 1 new
>N  1 ken@ganymede.localho  Thu Jun  6 11:21  19/638   "☺ Happy days!"
?
Message 1:
From ken@ganymede.localhost  Thu Jun  6 11:21:44 2013
X-Original-To: ken
Delivered-To: ken@ganymede.localhost
Content-Disposition: inline
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf8
MIME-Version: 1.0
X-Mailer: MIME::Lite 3.029 (F2.84; T1.38; A2.12; B3.13; Q3.13)
Date: Thu, 6 Jun 2013 11:21:44 +1000
To: ken@ganymede.localhost
From: ken@ganymede.localhost
Subject: ☺ Happy days!

Testing 1 2 3

?