"I suspect I'm the kind of irritating poster you all cringe at when you see the post (...) I dont know perl, however I use a complicated script and I tweak it as much as I can with what little I know."

There's nothing wrong with this. I started out doing just that; editing existing scripts. You'll notice that you're gonna understand the code at a certain point if you look at it enough (and mess with it). Then you'll go and add certain pieces of code yourself and before you know it, you write your own scripts!

It's always nice to have some books laying around though. The O'Reilly Perl books seem popular amongst the Perlmonks (and must say I like them myself).

"Well, I was informed on a perl newsgroup that the sendmail is "so 90s" and It isnt secure. And I should use Mail::sendmail in its stead."

I wonder why that was said. If you posted it in some sysadmin group, I could imagine the response. Sendmail is a MTA that can do too much for the average user and if you don't know why Sendmail is better than say Postfix, Exim, etc., chances are you don't need Sendmail (and probably shouldn't). Sendmail is/was known for many security flaws in the past (although it has been pretty quiet lately (or did I miss something? ;)). But that has nothing to do with your scripts, for I take it you aren't the sysadmin. I'm not aware of any security risks in Mail::Mailer::sendmail, but of course, you can turn any script into an insecure piece of work; wheter you use Perl modules or not.

For emailing there are too many modules and I've seen praise for most of them on Perlmonks somewhere. The "Mail Module preference" can become the new holy flame war topic, like "vi vs. emacs" ;-)

So, if the code ain't broken, don't fix it, or let some of the guys who claim it's insecure explain to you why this exactly is the case, so you might fix it.

Just my €0,02