So... for this example you don't actually have any unicode characters at all, right? Your __DATA__ is using html entities written in ASCII, and all the literals are also ASCII. And the emoji still doesn't come through?

For debugging, you can always "view source" in your mail client (well, usually, or maybe you need to install Thunderbird). The source of the email should reveal if something broke your HTML.

When you get past this first hurdle though, and go back to using Unicode characters, you should:

• Decode the CGI parameters into unicode strings
• Make sure your DBI was connected with option { mysql_enable_utf8 => 1 }
• Declare your content types as text/html; charset=UTF-8 or text/plain; charset=UTF-8
• Put use utf8; at the top of the script if any of your literals have a non-ASCII character.
• Encode the headers (if there's any chance they contain non-ASCII)

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