How are you sending the email? This makes a big difference. If you are using sendmail with headers, then putting the addresses in in the To: header will work as a comma-separated list. Sendmail will look at the To: heade to figure out where to send the email. Sendmail can also take the addresses on the command line. If you are using Net::SMTP or another SMTP module, then you need to pass the destination addresses through the API, because they usually don't look at the To: header to pull off the addresses.