Hello. This is my first post.

I have been working on a program that should notify me of certain things via email. I seek comments on the solution described in the code below. 


#!/usr/bin/perl -w
# $Id: mailtest.pl,v 1.1 2001/08/10 19:32:21 jamgill Exp $

# this little  ditty demonstrates using /bin/mail from
# within a perl program.  it sends emaill to the address
# with a subject line of the program's name and a message
# of "hello world" and the date.

use strict;

my $binmail = "/bin/mail";
my $address = 'my_address@my.corneroftha.net';
my $message;
my $subject = $0;

### Main:

$message = &generate_message($message);

`$binmail -t $address <<STOP
Subject: $subject

hello world.

$message
STOP`;

print "sent message with subject $0 to $address\n";

### Subs:
sub generate_message {
        my $timestamp = `date`;
        return($timestamp);
}

[download]
There are some restrictions that have brought me to /bin/mail: first, This will run on unix boxes with very little access to any modules that are not already installed. second, sendmail will probably not be available.

And the &generate_message, well ... that's just a placeholder for now.

Any comments on sending mail? Is this the best way to do it? Is this a decent way to do it?

In reply to mail out of /bin/mail by jamgill

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.