Or, in the spirit of the camel, Another Way To Do It is to just slurp the file into $message:

open HOMEWORK, "<syllabus.txt" or die "Blerch: $!\n";
local $/=undef;
$message=<HOMEWORK>;
# Send it on as you did above.
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CU
Robartes-

Update: fixed age-old gotcha of forgetting comma in open.