You should use either Mime::Lite or MIME::Entity as they were designed to take the heartache out of doing this. Anyway your problem is you hand rolled formatting is wrong. Amongst other things you need: 

boundary="some_string"

--some_string
what's this eh, we need two leading -- for the boundary

--some_string
blah, note extra two -- on end of closing boundary below

--some_string--

[download]

You have random spaces, no quotes (optional but good), missing leading and trailing -- and no closing boundary so your boudaries are broken. Here is an example generated using MIME::Entity that shows you the correct format. It also shows you how easy it is to use. You can attach text, html, binary files (images etc): 

use MIME::Entity;

my $html = "<html>\n<head>\n</head>\n<body>\n  <p>This is some text\n<
+/body>\n</html>\n";
my $text = "This is some text\n";

### Create the top-level, and set up the mail headers:
$top = MIME::Entity->build(Type     => "multipart/alternative",
                           From     => 'me@myhost.com',
                           To       => 'you@yourhost.com',
                           Subject  => "Hello World!");

$top->attach(Data        => $text,
             Type        => "text/plain",
             Encoding    => "quoted-printable");

$top->attach(Data        => $html,
             Type        => "text/html",
             Encoding    => "quoted-printable");

$top->print(\*STDOUT);

__DATA__
Content-Type: multipart/alternative;
    boundary="----------=_1020843667-205993-0"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: binary
MIME-Version: 1.0
X-Mailer: MIME-tools 5.316 (Entity 5.212)
From: me@myhost.com
To: you@yourhost.com
Subject: Hello World!

This is a multi-part message in MIME format...

------------=_1020843667-205993-0
Content-Type: text/plain
Content-Disposition: inline
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

This is some text

------------=_1020843667-205993-0
Content-Type: text/html
Content-Disposition: inline
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable


<html>
<head>
</head>
<body>
  <p>This is some text
</body>
</html>

------------=_1020843667-205993-0--

[download]

As an additional comment print MAIL "blah"; print MAIL "blech"...on and on could be replaced with a nice neat heredoc like this: 

$message = <<"END_MESSAGE";
To: $email
Reply-to: <$our_email>
From: $us <$our_email>
Subject: $list_name
    
Hello $name,
    
$message
    
$us
END_MESSAGE

open ('MAIL', "|$mail_prog -t -i") or DieNice("Can't open '$mail_prog'
+: $!\n");
print MAIL $message;

[download]

cheers

tachyon

s&&rsenoyhcatreve&&&s&n.+t&"$'$`$\"$\&"&ee&&y&srve&&d&&print

In reply to Re: Sending Rich/HTML email by tachyon
in thread Sending Rich/HTML email by nmerriweather

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


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