Congrats on fixing it yourself via other routes.
Another thing to possibly look at is that you seem to have a typo in you example code

$form_address = "newsletter\@freshnews.com";
[download]

Verses

From    => $from_address,
[download]

You have form and from so it may have been due to the fact that you had an undefined reference use strict; and perl -w would pick this up for you :-)

---If it doesn't fit use a bigger hammer