Ah, no, you need to use newlines in the file, and substitute with CRLF before sending.. reading in like that will just read them as literal characters:

$CRLF = "\015\012";
$message =~ s/\n/$CRLF/gs;
[download]

And btw, there are lots of nice templating systems, eg: Text::Template, without creating your own :)

C.