in reply to mail out of /bin/mail

If your restrictions are valid, then yeah this is okay if you have absolute control over the body, subject and address of the message. Otherwise it's sometimes possible to sent /bin/mail commands to be processed as part of the mail message body or trick the shell into running a command on your behalf.

So it's valid, just not recommended. Instead think about using one of the mail modules (Net::SMTP comes to mind) instead.