As a general note, you will need to abide by the laws and regulations of your country with respect to the use of e-mail. In general this boils down to - Don't send Spam!

I'd suggesting that you use software that's intended for mailing lists. (listserv, majordomo, mailman, etc.)

They handle throttling well, some of them can automatically deal with bounced messages, and they provide a way for recipients to opt-out, if they so wish. Any current mailing list software should also have ways to restrict who is allowed to send to the list (either a moderation feature, or completely rejecting those not permitted).

There's no reason to try to make something from scratch that has what might even be a longer legacy than perl. (I know I used to use L-Soft's Listserv product on a bitnet node)

I did a really basic mailer, but I highly recommend Mail::Bulkmail, as it provides many, many more features and error checking etc.

If your are interested:

Mailer:

HTH.

foreach (<LIST>) ==> this is a bad idea (and bad practice)...

This is what happens if you use it: first a temporary list is created, and that list will be passed to foreach. This means you are first reading the entire file, it would be much better to read it line by line...

(Which you can do by using something like while (<LIST>)...)

(Update, typo)

Yes of course. Thanks for the advice.

I'll update it.

Walking the road to enlightenment... I found a penguin and a camel on the way.....
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Keep in mind that no matter what method/module you use, if you are using an outside hosting service, you may be limited to the number of e-mails you can send, e.g., I had to get an extension to raise my limit from 100/hour to 250.

Also, you if you need attachment capabilities, I don't think Mail::Bulk has that ability.

Of course, you also need to be sending from a static IP connected to a domain name that the recipient can verify. If you're sending from your home computer (I've done this before), a fair number of your emails will be blocked because they're coming from a dynamic IP and/or look like they're spoofing the domain given as sender. What you really need is software running on your hosting account that connects directly to the recipient.

Incidently, Verio allows you to send pretty much any number of emails (within reasonable limits), so long as they aren't spam and aren't dumped on them all at once. I just leave my script running with an email sent every couple seconds and go do something else. A log of emails already sent will allow you to rerun the script if something goes wrong (though I've never had problems yet), without duplicating emails. Just remember to set Return-Path to a separate email box so you can easily analyze rejected emails.