ok thanks for the code, i appreciate it! i have a couple of things...the last line which says

die qq(Can't fork: $!'n);

is the 'n suppose to be \n?
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i did run your code in conjunction with what im doing but i still had the same problem, the browser was still communicating with the perl script the whole time the emails were being sent, almost as if the fork wasnt actually sending the emails and the perl script was? i did overcome this by placing close STDIN, STDOUT, STDERR all inside the parent process, that completely cut the parent process from from everything and seems to have done the trick :) i suspect it may cause some other problem im unaware of?

now that it seesm ive created a fork is there anyway to cancel a fork already in process?

thanks rich