in reply to SMTP and Authentication

I'm not sure I follow, but if you want to send mail, just use Mail::Sendmail, which, in spite of the misleading name, does not require sendmail(1) and is pure Perl to boot.

From TFM:

SYNOPSIS use Mail::Sendmail; %mail = ( To => 'you@there.com', From => 'me@here.com', Message => "This is a very short message" ); sendmail(%mail) or die $Mail::Sendmail::error; print "OK. Log says:\n", $Mail::Sendmail::log;