You can get started by rethinking your choice to not use modules. {grin} There's a few good generic server modules out there, such as:

• Net::Gen
• Netserver::Generic
• EventServer
• POE

that would keep you from the drudgery of handling some of the low-level bookkeeping. Check those out first, or at least steal ideas from them.

Unless you bail quickly, you'll need to either fork, pre-fork, or somehow "little t" thread or "big T" Thread to talk to all the conversations. And doing SMTP is not trivial. I've wanted to do a generic server-side comparable to what Net::Cmd did for client-side for a long time, and that would have helped you. Sorry, still on that overly-long todo list. {grin}

-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker