One clarification i have realized was important if anyone else has the same problem. My internal server errors were generated only from mailing addresses from WITHIN my server. So a message from one virtual host to another virtual host is what was causing the cgi to crash. The open2 solution is still in place and does not 500 when mailing to a bad address. yeah!

Also, sendmail was reporting a bad header and dropping the bad address in a dead.letter file. By using open2 my perl script can easily read this error and report to the user the problem. This saves my script a lot of time and gives me the most information. Thanks monks.

jtrue