in reply to special character printing issue

Maybe you need Encode?
use Encode qw{ decode }; my $smtpban = decode('utf-8', qx{ smtpban -s $mail | tail -n +20 });
لսႽ† ᥲᥒ⚪⟊Ⴙᘓᖇ Ꮅᘓᖇ⎱ Ⴙᥲ𝇋ƙᘓᖇ