Your talking about two different things here. SSL is the Secure Socket Layer. In the scope of the OSI network model, SSL will encrypt the socket level communications between the sender and the reciever. Thus, both sides would have to be able to use SSL to communicate. Once the message arrives at the other end, the message is stored in a plain text format.

If you want to keep the messages encypted until they are read (which I'm assuming you want to do), you can use a number of encyption methods to generate a garbage message that contains the orginial message. A popular method is PGP, but alternatives include RC5 and Blowfish. As a side note, the reciever will need to have a public key to unlock your message.

CPAN should contain modules for using any of the encryption methods above. Good luck!

In reply to Re: SMTP with SSL by dhable
in thread SMTP with SSL by N Watkins

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.