Regarding the e-mail portion of your question, I did something that looks a lot like Gerard's above (we must have the same collection of books), but I used the Mail perl module:

My code that relates to the e-mailing is as follows:

   $mailer = Mail::Mailer->new("mail");
   $mailer->open({From=>$from_address,
                  To=>$to_address,
                  Subject=>$subject,
                  })
            or die "Can't open: $!\n";
   print $mailer @body;
   $mailer->close();
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Of course, the string variables are all set in code lines above this excerpt.