You came _this_ close to getting it right :)

while ($requests = <REQUESTS>) {
      if ($requests ne "\n") {
          print MAIL "$requests";
      }
      }
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The problem is that single quotes don't convert things like \n, so you were printing everything except lines that contain a literal \, followed by a literal n.

In the "there's more than one way to do it" tradition, you could just use the grep command.

print MAIL grep !/^$/,<REQUESTS>;
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The "empty line" regular expression will work because $ will match just before the \n.

You could also write your code using the "suffix" form of the condition.

while ($requests = <REQUESTS>) {
    print MAIL $requests if $requests ne "\n";
}
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or

while ($requests = <REQUESTS>) {
    print MAIL $requests unless $requests=~/^$/;
}
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Hope this helps!
--
Mike (Edit: had fouled up the grep example)