Quick and Dirty Everyday Email Subroutine

Just a simple subroutine that I have been using as a novice perl programmer. I know that it is not fully optioned and that many other libraries offer better email functionality but I think that it works great for me and I have reused it over and over, so for other novices like me out there here you go. To use it just cut and paste it into your script, call it by using &email(mail_prog,to,from,subject,body); the fields I guess explain themselves PS. you dont have to worry about assigning different variable names because it uses local varible names that are contained in the subroutine.

sub email {
local($mail_prog, $to, $from, $subject, $body) = @_; 
    open(MAIL, "|$mail_prog -t");
    print MAIL "To: $to \n";
    print MAIL "From: $from \n";
    print MAIL "Subject: $subject \n\n";
    print MAIL "$body";
    print MAIL "\n\n";
    close (MAIL);
}
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Comment on Quick and Dirty Everyday Email Subroutine Download Code

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Re: Quick and Dirty Everyday Email Subroutine by ZZamboni (Curate) on Jun 16, 2001 at 21:41 UTC
Sorry for being picky, but I just want to point out that something like this is OK for "quick and dirty" stuff (I used something similar here), but only if you have absolute control over the contents of $mail_prog. Otherwise, it would be very easy for someone to do very nasty things using that variable and the open. --ZZamboni	[reply]
Re: Quick and Dirty Everyday Email Subroutine by p3rl (Novice) on Jun 18, 2001 at 13:24 UTC
I see what you mean You are right, but when I use this code i have a varible $mail_prog at the top of the script. True if you take it as input from a form it can be quite dangerous. Like: `#!/usr/bin/perl ....... $mail_prog = "/usr/bin/sendmail"; ....... Call Email Subroutine here. ........` [download]	[reply] [d/l]