Ok, I'm testing to see if the tie was successful or not. The current script is below and there isn't a problem, the database is successful at that point. Any other suggestions?

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use strict;
use CGI;
use POSIX;

my $query = CGI->new;
my %form = %{$query->Vars};

require SDBM_File;

my %dbm;
my $dbm_file = "evs.dbm";

my $accountID = $query->url_param('accountID');
my $accountAD = $query->url_param('accountAD');

tie %dbm, 'SDBM_File', $dbm_file, O_CREAT|O_RDWR, 0644;
if (!tied %dbm) {
  print "database unsuccessful.\n";
}

  use CGI qw/:standard/;
  print header,
        start_html('EVS'),
        start_form,
        "What's your email address? ",textfield('usermail'),p,
        submit,
        end_form,
        hr;
chomp $form{"usermail"};

my $chars;
my $adminmail = "admin\@test.com";
my $sendmail = "/usr/lib/sendmail";


my @chars = ( "A" .. "Z", "a" .. "z", 0 .. 9, qw(! @ $ % ^ & * ) );
my $ID;

### randomize characters
do { $ID = join '', map { $chars[ rand @chars ] } 1..17; } 
while grep {$_ eq $ID} my @used;

### If USERMAIL exists add information to notverified DBM
if ($form{'usermail'}) {
my @unverified_emails=($form{'usermail'}, $ID);
$dbm{'$notverified'}= join "::",@unverified_emails;
#foreach my $mail (split /::/, $dbm{'notverified'}) {
#  print "$mail is not verified!\n";
#}
        print "An email has been sent to $form{'usermail'}.  Please ch
+eck it to verify your information.\n";


### email the users
my $accountAD = "$form{'usermail'}";
my $accountID = $ID;

open (MAIL, "|$sendmail -t") or die "Cannot access mail";
  print MAIL "To: $form{'usermail'}\n";
  print MAIL "From: $adminmail\n";
  print MAIL "Subject: Verify your Email Address\n\n";
  print MAIL "http://sulfericacid.perlmonk.org/evs/evs.pl?accountID=$a
+ccountID&accountAD=$accountAD\n";
close (MAIL);
}

### If url_param() exists
if ($accountID && $accountAD) {
&params;
}

###  If url_param() exists check to see if it exists in DBM
sub params { 
if ($accountID && ($accountAD ne '') && (exists $dbm{'$notverified'}))
+ {
$dbm{'$verified'} = $accountAD;
  print "Your address has been indexed!\n";

### test database prints
foreach (sort keys(%dbm)) {
print "$_ => $dbm{$_}\n";
}
} else {
  print "Your email address and registration did not match.  Please ch
+eck your email again.\n";
}
}
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