content-length first line

sgprog1 has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Writing a simple program that basically emails some text to someone ($emailid):

 open MAIL,"|/usr/bin/mailx -s '$subject' -r 'email\@email.com' $email
+id";
print MAIL "Lines of Text go here";
close MAIL;
[download]

It works but the 1st line of the email is always the header "Content-length: ###" Any idea how to not have that "Content-length:" line display in the email. Thanks.

Comment on content-length first line Download Code

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Re: content-length first line by moritz (Cardinal) on Sep 15, 2009 at 20:03 UTC
I recommend using a proper module for sending emails, MIME::Lite is often recommended, and I so far my experience with it has been very good. Your approach is rather fragile and might be a source of trouble, for example if $subject or $emailid are not properly escaped. Perl 6 - links to (nearly) everything that is Perl 6.	[reply]
Re: content-length first line by Corion (Patriarch) on Sep 15, 2009 at 20:05 UTC
Preferrably over Sewi's solution, I'd look at using MIME::Lite instead of opening a socket to whatever incarnation of `sendmail` lives on your system directly. It's far less spam-prone and works even on Windows.	[reply] [d/l]
Re: content-length first line by Sewi (Friar) on Sep 15, 2009 at 19:54 UTC
Try `print "[$subject] [$emailid]\n";` [download] I guess you got a newline char at the end of one of them which will show up in a linebreak before the closing bracket. If this doesn't help, try `print "open MAIL,\"\|/usr/bin/mailx -s '$subject' -r 'email\@email.com' + $email +id\";\n"; print "Lines of Text go here";` [download] to see what you're really passing to mailx. Checking your inbox on the mailserver (usually in /var/spool/mail/) may also help. Try Padre - the free Perl IDE	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re^2: content-length first line by ikegami (Patriarch) on Sep 15, 2009 at 20:16 UTC
If you're right (and you probably are), it's odd and unfortunate that the mailer blindly inserts the newline rather than escaping it or throwing an error. boooo!	[reply]
Re: content-length first line by Sewi (Friar) on Sep 15, 2009 at 20:56 UTC
I agree with you two, a Module is a better solution for sending mail, but I tried to solve the actual problem and if there are any newlines, the Module could do the same suspicious things but is harder to debug. Personally, I prefer piped mail program when writing one-time scripts which need to mail something usually to one person (usually me). But these scripts never leave the machine where they're written and I know the mail server installation. Try Padre - the free Perl IDE	[reply]