Perl is easy and highly effective in most situations if you understand perl. Web-based applications are easy if you understand html, dhtml, css, javascript, etc. Mail aplications can be difficult, very difficult. I wrote a web based email application for our company for world roaming users to access our exchange 5.5 server. ok, so exchange 5.5 makes it even harder but, the point is that it wasn't perl that made the job hard. There are many existing perl modules to handle most any situation regarding mail. CPAN is full of them and most are pretty darn good.