All,
Incidently, after getting back from my gameshow fix, I discovered that Email::Send::SMTP apparently does this already. Here is an excerpt from the docs:

Any arguments passed to send will be passed to Net::SMTP->new(), with some exceptions. username and password, if passed, are used to invoke Net::SMTP->auth() for SASL authentication support. ssl, if set to true, turns on SSL support by using Net::SMTP::SSL.

ahhhhh - the power of perl.