Also, "fuction(arguments);" won't interpolate the result you want.

You'd probably want something like this, assuming your sendmail arguments are correct:

open(SENDMAIL, "|/usr/lib/sendmail -oi -t -odq")
  || die "Cannot for mail: $!";

# function?  You'll want to specify real arguments, of course
my $body=fuction(arguments);

# Don't forget the Date: and Subject: headers

print SENDMAIL << "EOF";
From: me\@abc.com
To: you\@xyz.com

$body
EOF

close(SENDMAIL);
[download]

First off, sending stuff directly to Sendmail can be extraordinarily dangerous. You have to be very dilligent about what you actually send in as data or you could have a very unpleasant surprise. Think about what might happen if someone passed in an email address as the string "hahascrewyou@suckers.com; rm -rf ~". You're not sending in that kind of stuff on the command line, but still, taint checking is your friend, as will be libraries such as Email::Valid. Despite all the precautions you might take, and the fact that you're not passing args on the command line but rather through stdin helps, it's still messy and you're better off using a wrapper library.

I use Mail::Mailer. Assuming that you're not passing around bogus data, here's the basic code snippet that I use.

my $mailer = Mail::Mailer->new('sendmail');
$mailer->open({From    => 'someone@somewhere.com',
               To      => 'recipient@someplace.com',
               Subject => 'this is the subject'});
print $mailer "this is the body!";
$mailer->close();
[download]

print SENDMAIL << "EOF";
From: me\@abc.com
To: you\@xyz.com
EOF
print SENDMAIL fuction(arguments);

close(SENDMAIL);
[download]

my $text = function(arguments);

print SENDMAIL << "EOF";
From: me\@abc.com
To: you\@xyz.com
$text
EOF

close(SENDMAIL);
[download]

Mime::Lite became our best friend, appearing at the bottom of each script , sending out the results to all the folks who cared. I am not sure if this is fits what you are doing but if you are trying to send a message with the output of a program, this method of saving it to a file and then sending that file worked out well for us.

We were able to pretty much deploy our attempts with the example code provided so it might be worth your trouble to check out.

I'd suggest you to try use Mail::Sender for sending letters from Perl scripts.

This module is easy in using but it leaves many useful features: sending plain and HTML text, addition attachments as separate file or include them into letter body etc. (See many examples in the module documentation)

Also, there is a other good module - MIME::Entity. This module provides an interface for building messages as MIME entities. This module leaves you develop more unitized applications. There are many examples in the documentation of this module.

If you prefer use low level for sending letters, I'd recomend you to look at RFC 2822: Internet Message Format.

      
--------------------------------
SV* sv_bless(SV* sv, HV* stash);