in reply to Defining variable for module, but IŽll only have it later

It looks to me like you need your FatalsToEmail module to take a reference to a scalar and you need to pass it a reference to $fte_username.

Your package might look something like this... 

package FatalsToClient;
use vars qw($client);

sub import {
  my $pkg  = shift; 
  my %args = @_;
  $client  = $args{Client}; 
}
1;

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And you'd use that something like this... 
my $fte_username = "";
use FatalsToClient (Client => \$fte_username);

$fte_username = "client";
print $$FatalsToClient::client, $/;
$fte_username = "something else";
print $$FatalsToClient::client, $/;

[download]
Please recognize that this code is just for illustration. You'll want yours to be somewhat cleaner I expect.

-sauoq
"My two cents aren't worth a dime.";

In Section Seekers of Perl Wisdom