(Moving this off my pad and into here - where it belongs)

Try running the following code. I think it meets most of your requirements. To be perfectly honest, it's probably not much better than your existing code - but it does demonstrate a different approach, and the use of a HOH which I mentioned in my initial reply.

If there are any parts of it that need explaining, feel free to ask :)

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
use Data::Dumper;

# Replace the following with the location of your maillog
# (Don't forget to include the full path if it isn't in the cwd)
my $mail_log = 'billie_t.log';

my %messages;
my $valid_src = 'exch';
my $valid_dst = 'gov.au';
my $verbose = 1;    # Change this to 1 if you want to see which lines 
+are ignored

open my $mail_fh, '<', $mail_log
    or die "Cannot open $mail_log:$!\n";


while (my $line = <$mail_fh>) {
    chomp($line);
    if ($line =~ /qmgr.*?from=/) {      # It's a new mail
        my ($id, $from) = (split /\s+/, $line)[5,6];
        chop($id);                      # remove the colon
        $from =~ s/^from=<(.*?)>,/$1/;
        $messages{$id}{from} = $from;
    }
    elsif ($line =~ /client=/) {
        my ($id, $client) = (split /\s+/, $line)[5,6];
        chop($id);
        $client =~ s/client=(.*)/$1/;
        $messages{$id}{client} = $client;
    }
    elsif ($line =~ /relay=localhost/) {
        my ($id, $to, $status) = (split /\s+/, $line, 10)[5,6,9];
        chop($id);
        $to =~ s/to=<(.*?)>,/$1/;
        my ($remote_id) = $status =~ m/([0-9A-Z]+)\)$/;
        $status =~ s/.*?\((.*?)\)$/$1/;
        $messages{$id}{to} = $to;
        $messages{$id}{status} = $status;
        $messages{$id}{remote_id} = $remote_id;
    }
    else {
        print "Skipping... $line\n" if $verbose;
    }
}

for my $id (sort keys %messages) {
    no warnings 'uninitialized';
    next if (!$messages{$id}{client} || $messages{$id}{client} !~ /\Q$
+valid_src\E/);
    next if (!$messages{$id}{to} || $messages{$id}{to} !~ /\Q$valid_ds
+t\E/);
    print qq(Valid message found: ID=$id\n\tFROM=$messages{$id}{from}\
+n\t),
          qq(TO=$messages{$id}{to}\n\tSTATUS=$messages{$id}{status}\n\
+t),
          qq(CLIENT=$messages{$id}{client}\n\tREMOTE_ID=$messages{$id}
+{remote_id}\n\n);
}

# Uncomment the following line to get a better picture of the datastru
+cture that is created
# (You might want to redirect the output to a file)
#print Dumper(\%messages);

close $mail_fh;
[download]

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