I am going nuts soon! I am trying to send an email to a newly registered user of my webpage with an membership activation link. Here are some parts from my code. 
#this is my sub for sending the email

sub sendMail{
    # application object
  my $self = shift;

    # get arguments
    my ($to, $from, $subject, $text) = @_;
    
    open (MAIL, "|/usr/lib/sendmail -t -oi")
    or die("Can not find sendmail: $!");
    print MAIL <<_MAIL_;
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
To: $to
From: $from
Cc:
Subject: $subject
 
$text
 
_MAIL_
    close MAIL;
}

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I am calling the sendMail sub from another sub with the following data: 
my $from = "noreply\@xxxxxx.com";
my $subject = "Membership";
my $link = "http://www.xxxxxx.com/xxxxxx/index.cgi?rm=activate&id=$act
+ivate_code&email=$email";
my $text = "<html><head><title></title></head><body><a href=\"$link\">
+$link</a></body></html>";

$self->sendMail($email, $from, $subject, $text);

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There can be some smaller syntax error in the above code because I took it out from the bigger picture.
I am using Data::GUID for my $activate_code for example: 956F8CE6-BA7D-11DA-A132-94F4820E4FA7 and the email to the user comes from a mySQL DB.
I've tried to encode the link with the following sub: 
sub URLEncode {
    my $theURL = $_[0];
   $theURL =~ s/([\W])/"%" . uc(sprintf("%2.2x",ord($1)))/eg;
   return $theURL;
}

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I dont know where to start with my questions?
First of all should I send the email as text/plain or text/html?
Can I somehow make sure this email can be read from both commercial email services and for example: outlook? Do I have to encode the link?
I pretty much trialed and errored every possible combination encoding/decoding to different email addresses. If someone could point me in the right direction, is there any modules I can use or ready made scripts for this?

In reply to email activation link by boboson

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