go with a recent version of Net::SMTP. This version has support for explicit and implicit SSL/TLS and also for IPv6. It also does proper certificate validation and validation is enabled by default. And it is a CORE module, although the version with SSL is only included starting with perl 5.22.0 (and still needs IO::Socket::SSL installed). With older versions you can either install the new libnet (which includes Net::SMTP), install Net::SSLGlue::SMTP which monkey patches Net::SMTP for SSL support or use Net::SMTPS which behaves similar (but not the same) to Net::SMTP with SSL support.
Since Net::SMTP cares only about the SMTP dialog you can still use Mime::Lite as you've used to be to construct the mail and then send it within the SMTP dialog with