You could also communicate with the MTA on the protocol level, which would be independant of where sendmail is, whether or not you're using qmail or whatever smtp agent.
cleen wrote a good node on this a while back. I currently use that in all the scripts and programs I write to send email to a list of users. Its portable accross many different UN*X's and doesn't rely on that local machine running an MTA as I can specify the mail host to connect to.

You might also be interested in the Net::SMTP, Net::POP3 which do effectively the same thing in a module.


-brad..
'reinvent the wheel and make it bigger, better, and with metal spikes, yeah, we can never have enough metal spikes'