Your worries are ill-founded. And to the people that replied to this post, about interpolation and what-not, re-read his comment: the string is populated from a database query.

Had he written $x = "foo@bar", he'd have been warned by Perl. But that's not the case.

In addition, because the @ is in a string, there's no fear of it being read by Perl as an array, unless he evaluates the variable. All in all, he doesn't need to do jack to the string. In fact, adding a backslash will probably cause a mailing client to break.

_____________________________________________________
Jeff japhy Pinyan: Perl, regex, and perl hacker.
s++=END;++y(;-P)}y js++=;shajsj<++y(p-q)}?print:??;