I would suggest that you should try simple LWP first and if you realize that the authentication is complex (more than just setting user and password in the standard brower user/password window) to use WWW::Mechanize. Your code should look like this: require LWP::UserAgent; my $ua = LWP::UserAgent->new; $ua->timeout(10); $ua->proxy('https', 'ftp', 'http://proxy.sn.no:8001/'); $ua->credentials( 'servername:portnumber', 'realm-name', 'username' => 'password' ); Have a look at http://lwp.interglacial.com/ch11_03.htm. If you use Windows, then you may also have issues with the SSL module as it is not always included in the distribution.