It's basic, it's fast, it's portable, and you don't have to worry about installing a whole module to send a message.

I strongly disagree with this - This approach is by far not portable as it depends on a number of factors:

• the installation of sendmail on the local machine; this is most certainly not a given, particularly when the script may be run in a Windows environment,
• the installation of the sendmail binary in the /usr/sbin directory; other common locations for this binary include /usr/lib and /opt/bin, and,
• the correct configuration of sendmail for mail delivery in the manner required.

Furthermore, as for the ease of using this approach without installing modules, the Net::SMTP module is included as part of the core Perl installation and as such should be available on all installations. Additionally the use of this module is very straight-forward, for example,

my $smtp = Net::SMTP->new('mail.mydomain.com');
$smtp->mail($fromaddr);
$smtp->to($to);
$smtp->data();
$smtp->data("Subject: $subject\n\n");
$smtp->data($message);
$smtp->dataend();
$smtp->quit;
[download]

Furthermore, the use of the local network SMTP server will make your network administrator happier as it is at this point that network mail policies and statistics reporting is often based.