Placeholders have nothing to do with files. You had a DBI nightmare, apparently.

I'm not entirely clear on what you're trying to do here.
Do you want to get "user" from each line in that file?
If so

open (VARIABLES, "<variables.dat") or die "Error : $!\n";
while (<VARIABLES>){
  my ($ip, $domain, $smtp, $user, $name, $sendto) = split;
  print "$user\n";
}
close VARIABLES;
[download]

--perlplexer