There are several others that work under Windows. Mail:Sendmail, Net::SMTP, ...

Yes, I agree the docs are not too good. Any suggestions for improvement (or even whole parts rewritten ;-) are appreciated. I guess it would be quicker by email though.

For the performance ... I think there are only two improvements possible. First ... if your script sends several mail messages keep the $sender object. It is NOT connected to the server, but still it would be cheaper. Second ... try to use the IP address instead of the name of the SMTP server.

The fact that you connect to a Unix server from a Windows machine should not matter much as long as the connection between the two is reasonably quick. Try to telnet to.the.server 25 and see how long it took to get the SMPT server's greeting. If it does take too long you might consider (assuming the windows machine is Win2k or WinNT or WinXP) starting the "Simple Mail Transfer Protocol" service and setting it up to send all emails to that unix box (and restricting the access so that the SMTP on the windows box is only accessible from localhost).

Let me know if you need help setting this up (I know for sure I WOULD have big problems trying to set up anything like this under Unix.)

As far as the jokes are concerned ... when I wrote the first versions my english was too bad to even understand jokes, let alone write any. And since then I'm only patching and patching and patching ... which makes the docs quite messy actually. :-(