Emailing from a Perl program - Perl Programming

Posted by enquirer (enquirer), 8 August 2002

An enquirer by email wrote:

In the following context is it also possible to generate a email if a file cannot be opened

open (FILEHANDLE, "/file/location/somename.txt") || die "Problem with file opening - $!"

Can I put something on the end like a shell script statement

&& (echo "From: a_user@email.com"; echo "Subject: Something"; mail a_anotheruser@.email.com)

So in essence it would look like:

open (FILEHANDLE, "/file/location/somename.txt") || system (echo "From: a_user@email.com"; echo "Subject:
Something"; mail a_anotheruser.email.com) && die "Problem with file opening - $!"

Posted by admin (Graham Ellis), 8 August 2002

Yes - you can get the server to send you an email - sample code follows. One of the things that does vary from server to server is which email programs are available, and where they're located; my example uses the most common location for Linux / Unix boxes. I have also added a nice error message for the user, rather than have them get the default "Internal Server Error 500" message.

Code:

$wantfile = "insertfilenamehere";
unless ( open (FH,$wantfile)) {
open (MAIL, "|/usr/lib/sendmail graham\@wellho.net") ;
print MAIL "Subject: Web server cannot read file $wantfile\n";
print MAIL "From: Your Web Server <admin\@kwellho.net>\n\n";
print MAIL <<"XXX";
This is the body of the message that will be sent by the web server if
a CGI script that tries to open the file in \$wantfile should fail.
XXX
close (MAIL);
print "Content-type: Text/HTML\n\n";
print BROWSER <<"YYY";
<html>
<head><title>Error Page</title></head>
<body bgcolor=white>
Your requst to the server failed. You do not need to report the
problem, as an email has been sent to the server administrator to
detail the problem.
</body></html>
YYY
} else {
# Insert here the real job if the file opens correctly
}

Posted by John_Moylan (John_Moylan), 10 August 2002

I have seen many people send mail by piping to sendmail(or whatever) as Grahams example.

But there are some Modules that can help, Mail::Mailer being the one that I regularly use.

Code:

use Mail::Mailer;
my $mailer = Mail::Mailer->new("sendmail");

my $mailmssg = "Theres more than one way to do it";

$mailer->open({From => "never@spam.com",
To => "always@spam.com",
Cc => "seldom@spam.com",
BCc => "often@spam.com",
Subject => "We all spam together",
}) or croak "Can't do the mail thing : $!";

print $mailer $mailmssg;
$mailer->close();

(Sorry about the bad code formatting above, its a bit difficult when using the BB's code tags, but I hope you get the idea.)

I usually create a function wrapper for the Module to simplify calling it, but it's a nice clean way if your sending multiple emails from a program, and it handles 'CC & BCC' nicely too.

http://search.cpan.org/author/MARKOV/MailTools-1.48/Mail/Mailer.pm

jfp

Posted by John_Moylan (John_Moylan), 10 August 2002

Oh, and on the subject of this thread, I mainly used this to have the server mail me if it encountered errors.

Didn't want to be seen a moving "off topic"

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