Well, you certainly cannot assume that Sendmail exists on a Windows machine (frankly, you probably shouldn't assume it exists on Unix either). Instead, you should use one of the many fine mail-sending modules on CPAN (for example Mail::Mailer and Mail::Send, or perhaps Mail::SendEasy by our own gmpassos). All of these work with SMTP. Of course, you will need to know the SMTP server address. Your ISP should be able to provide this, or else you can ask them to install the Microsoft SMTP Service on your box, in which case you can use localhost.

Update: that only addresses the email issue. For other portability issues, look at perlport.

I tried all three of the CPAN modules you spoke of, but none of them are found when I test the script.

Can I just throw the SendEasy.pm in the same directory as my script? Would the use Mail::SendEasy; pick up on that file?

Thanks for your help!

- Justin

Actually you'll need to install the whole distribution, which consists of five files and one directory. You need to create a subdirectory called Mail, and copy SendEasy.pm into it, then create a subdirectory called SendEasy under it and put the other files in that. Shouldn't be too hard. Other posts in this thread point to more thorough discussions.

I send email from Windows boxes all the time ... but using a unix box somewhere ;-)

Specifically, the Net::SMTP protocol is not very difficult, IMO, if you can figure out the SMTP server to use. My guess, which you may need to ask NetworkSolutions to confirm, is to use mail.networksolutions.com:

$ dig networksolutions.com mx

; <<>> DiG 9.2.4 <<>> networksolutions.com mx
;; global options:  printcmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 15900
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 1, AUTHORITY: 3, ADDITIONAL: 4

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;networksolutions.com.          IN      MX

;; ANSWER SECTION:
networksolutions.com.   10800   IN      MX      10 mail.networksolutio
+ns.com.

[snip]
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Something like...

use Net::SMTP;

my $smtp = Net::SMTP->new(q('mail.networksolutions.com')) or
  die "Can't connect to SMTP server";
my $ownuser = 'me@myisp.com';

$smtp->mail($ownuser);
$smtp->to('joe@somewhereelse.net');
$smtp->data();
$smtp->datasend('Subject: Email from the server.',"\n");
$smtp->datasend('Date: ', scalar(time), "\n");
$smtp->datasend('To: ', join(', ', @emailaddrs), "\n");
$smtp->datasend('From: Packaging ' . $plat->platformID() . "<$ownaddr>
+\n");
$smtp->datasend('X-Mailer: Perl Net::SMTP', "\n");
$smtp->datasend("\n");

$smtp->datasend(@message_text);
$smtp->dataend();
$smtp->quit();
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Note that instead of connecting to a single server, I actually do something more like:

sub smtp_connect
{
  for my $s (@server_list) {
    my $smtp = Net::SMTP->new($s);
    return $smtp if $smtp;
  }
  undef;
}
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Well -- the problem there is that I'm not an admin on this windows machine. My client simply gave me his user/pass for his domain hosted by NetworkSolutions and said "go to town". So I'm at the mercy of NetworkSolutions, if they ever do respond to my ticket. I don't even have ssh access, so I can't even try to snoop around. :-\

- Justin

You don't need to be an admin to install your own perl modules, as long as there is no C portion that needs to be built. Start by creating a new directory in your home directory, say it is called mylib.

Now, download and untar/zip the distribution files from CPAN. In the lib directory of the directory created when you unpack the distribution, you will find another directory named Mail. Copy this directory to the mylib directory you created earlier. At the top of your perl script, insert the line use lib "path/to/mylib". You can use this same method to install any perl module you need, as long as it doesn't include any C code.

One last note. You already have a Mail directory in your personal library. If you install another module in the Mail family, you just need to copy the .pm file and any provided subdirectories into the existing Mail directory.

More experienced monks - please feel free to add/clarify anything I may have missed.

HTH
digger

Ah, got it. It should work by copying the installation structure of Mail::SendEasy to a subdirectory somewhere from another working Windows installation and then specifying that subdirectory in a "use lib" statement in your script on the hosted server .. as described by digger..

In such a tight hosted environment I would recommend asking the provider which SMTP outbound server to use, and how to authenticate to it (rather than picking some random servers based on the hosting company's name and mx), further, ensure your web server can in fact initiate connections outward bound, and the provider doesn't filter for reasons of spam prevention .. some folks have the opinion a virtual hosting web server shouldn't send anything to the Internet with a SYN flag :)

I personally have used MIME::LITE and Mail::Sender. I primarily program on windows machines and find if you want to send plain emails, sendmail will work. However, if you want to send attachments, the other two modules are helpful. As in the differences in windows and *NIX, the script I've written were identical. I would recommend activestate activeperl. You can use the ppm utility from activetstate to install perl modules.

Hope this helps

#!/usr/bin/perl
use lib 'path\to\lib';
use Mail::Mailer;

$sender = 'sender@email.com';
$recipient = 'recipient@email.com';
$subject = 'test';
$message = 'test';

$smtp = new Mail::Mailer 'smtp', Server => localhost;

$smtp->open({ From => $sender, To => $recipient, Subject => $subject})
+ or die "Can't open: $!\n";
    print $smtp $message;
$smtp->close();

print "Content-type: text/html\n\n";
print "hello world<br/>\n";
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I think the mail thing is pretty much covered for you. I do my own business on the side, what has worked well for me is to have my clients pay me for the hosting and I work with a reseller. That way if a client doesn't already have space (if they do I deal with it) then I ensure I have something that I can work with. Just a suggestion that may make your life easier in the future.

About Mail::SendEasy be installed with our code (not in the Perl library), you just need to have this directory structure from your script.pl:

./Mail/SendEasy.pm
./Mail/SendEasy/AUTH.pm
./Mail/SendEasy/Base64.pm
./Mail/SendEasy/IOScalar.pm
./Mail/SendEasy/SMTP.pm
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