The reason why is that you are lacking carriage return/line feed pairs on your To, From, and Subject lines, as well as an extra one (creating a blank line) after the last of the headers, before the body of the message. While the SMTP transaction will figure out from the calls to the mail() and to() functions, the mail client has only the data when received, which RFC-2822 states, consists of:

A message consists of header fields (collectively called "the header of the message") followed, optionally, by a body. The header is a sequence of lines of characters with special syntax as defined in this standard. The body is simply a sequence of characters that follows the header and is separated from the header by an empty line (i.e., a line with nothing preceding the CRLF).

Hope that helps.

EDIT: Here's what I use:

    $smtp->datasend("From: $from\n\r" .
                    "Return-Path: $from\n\r" .
                    "Reply-To: $from\n\r" .
                    "To: $to\n\r" .
                    "Subject: $subject\n\r\n\r" .
                    $message);
[download]

Not that this has anything to do with Perl but the Return-path header is not a real SMTP header and you should not include it in your calls to $smtp->datasend().

The Return-path header is added by the final destination MTA and contains the copy value of the actual return path, otherwise known as the envelope from address. In terms of Net::SMTP this is the value that was specified using $smtp->mail($from).

Thanks.

I'll try swapping out the commas for semi-colons on the To: and From: lines on the datasend lines.

Walking the road to enlightenment... I found a penguin and a camel on the way.....
Fancy a yourname@perl.me.uk? Just ask!!!

Actually you have to end every line of $smtp->datasend() with a ';' cause they are Different lines.
They are not part of the 'new' method
Also you should have your $to and your $from variables with the actuall email address, not what appears on the email.
So your code should look like this

my $to = "ghenry\@perl.me.uk";
my $from = "support\@perl.me.uk";
my $server = "relay.plus.net" ;
$smtp = Net::SMTP->new($server);
$smtp->mail($from);
$smtp->to($to);
$smtp->data();
$smtp->datasend("To: Gavin Henry <$to>\n");
$smtp->datasend("From: Support <$from>\n");
$smtp->datasend("Subject: Rsync backup success on $date\n");
$smtp->datasend("The remote backup has been completed.\n\n");
$smtp->datasend("Info:\n");
$smtp->datasend("\n$rsync\n");
$smtp->dataend();
$smtp->quit;
[download]


I also added a quit, to the smtp object, unless you intent to do anything else with it and the socket connection.


``The wise man doesn't give the right answers, he poses the right questions.'' TIMTOWTDI

Cheers,

It doesn't like CRLF, but newlines work fine.

The only problem now is the date field is blank, i.e. when it was received.

Walking the road to enlightenment... I found a penguin and a camel on the way.....
Fancy a yourname@perl.me.uk? Just ask!!!

The date field would be blank because you did not include the originating date (a Date: line) in the headers. The format for the date is in section 3.3 (pages 13 and 14) of the aforementioned RFC.

Hope that helps.