Re: "Learning Perl" book, Chapter 1 example: open MAIL, "|mail email_address" doesn't work

[drieux]

On Wednesday, Jun 4, 2003, at 00:44 US/Pacific, David Cantrell wrote:
On Tuesday, June 3, 2003 20:24 -0700 "Richard E. Adams" 
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

I am working through the exercises in Chapter 1 of Learning Perl, 
Second
Edition, O'Reilly publishers.  I am using MacOS X (10.1.5), and Perl,
v.5.6.0.  An excerpt from one of the author's programs shows the
following three lines:

open MAIL, "|mail YOUR_ADDRESS_HERE";
print MAIL "bad news: $someone guessed $someguess\n";
close MAIL;
[..]
To send mail, you need two components.  A mail client (aka a mail user 
agent or MUA) and an SMTP program (aka a mail transport agent or MTA). 
 The 'mail' program is an MUA.  It passes messages to a local MTA for 
delivery. IIRC on OS X the MTA (sendmail) is installed, but not 
configured, so 'mail' successfully hands the message over to sendmail, 
which then neither knows what to do with it, nor knows how to warn you 
of the fact.
I know that Richard is working two sets of questions:

        a. how do I do this specific thing from learning perl
        b. how do I do email with perl
May I highly recommend
        
http://search.cpan.org/author/MARKOV/MailTools-1.58/
as an alternative for doing the specifics of emailing
from perl. Sorting out sendmail is better these days
but can be more complex than merely learning perl.
I have some illustrations of email tricks in perl up at

http://www.wetware.com/drieux/pbl/Other/email/

which I did on my little OSX box.

As for the learning perl part, if he understands that
the code in the book was essentially demonstrating
        invoking an external command, eg: '/usr/bin/mail'
                from perl,
then he has the basics for doing one of the basic 'popen()'
style solutions. But as we notice, the book presumes that
everyone understands MTA/MTU and that by default 'sendmail'
is an available service on the local host.
ciao
drieux
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