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Email using perl

Having been forced to upgrade my old W98 machine to Vista, I now need to revamp everything software-wise.
I am connected with an organisation that I send out a regular email to. I used to use my own purpose-written Visual Basic program that used vbSendMail, and that worked very well. (I used a data file that contained all the email addresses so there was no fancy SQL database or similar - simply a text file that my program read)
However VB6 is no longer supported on Vista and I am trying to upgrade a perl module that I have that does (basically) the same thing - ie sends out emails
The trouble is, the variations of perl email programs that I have used (MIME::LITE, and a couple of others) don't work ALL that well - the smtp connections either crash out after a certain number of email sends OR something else doesn't work OR the perl module that someone else recommends doesn't actually do the job I want.
Therefore - I want a reliable, easy to use perl email module that will enable me to send 400-500 emails in a short period of time, that will not time out in a connection, won't cost me anything and will be fairly easy to use, and must run on Windows.
Does anyone know of such a beast - ie a perl equivalent of vbSendMail that works?

ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION

Tintin

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GSD4ME

ASKER

Hello again Tintin - your clueless perl user here once again!

Does bulkmail work without any sort of glitches/features/problems/restrictions? EG Someone recommended MIME::Lite but that only allowed me to send 5 messages at a time before the smtp connection dropped and I got a silly "document not open .. " type message when it was nothing to do with documents at all.

Have you come across vbsendmail? Excellent piece of kit - I may well try and get in touch with the authors and get them to write the perl equivalent.

WIll give bulkmail the quick once over and see what appears.

Tintin

I'm not familar with vbsendmail myself, but the other alternative is to use windows sendmail.

http://glob.com.au/sendmail/

Tintin

Another sendmail version is http://www.indigostar.com/sendmail.htm

GSD4ME

ASKER

I have looked at Mail::Bulkmail and it seems very impressive.
HOWEVER - I can't get it to work!
I have played about with it and have done the following:
I have edited the bulkconfig file to reflect my bits and pieces (server names, defaults etc.).
I Have set up my server information in a 'servers' file
I have edited the Mail::Bulkmail::Server pm module to say "disconnect('quietly')" as I kept getting a "server won't respond to 'quit' message" when I tried to send bulk mail. (In this respect the error file was being populated by error messages to help me)
However havingtried a bulkmail sendthis morning (an important AGM notification) - everything seems to go through - the error log is empty BUT there is nothing in the BADLIST or GOODLIST files. There seems to be have been no sending of any messages (nobody has received them) so I am now stuck. No errors but no emails either.
Any help?
I am going to try and do a 'conversation' log next.

Relevant code is this:
@totalDisList = [];
...etc etc.
then for each member I do a
push (@totalDisList, $memberemailaddress);
... more code ...
my $bulk = Mail::Bulkmail->new() || die Mail::Bulkmail->error();
$bulk->LIST(@totalDisList);
$bulk->From($formParam{'emailFromAddress'} ."\n");
$bulk->Sender($formParam{'emailFromAddress'} ."\n");
$bulk->ReplyTo($formParam{'emailFromAddress'} ."\n");
$bulk->Subject($formParam{'subjectLineText'} . "\n");
$bulk->Message($formParam{'messageBody'}."\n\n");
$bulk->HTML(1);
$bulk->BAD ('C:\Users\Alan\Desktop\badlist.txt');
$bulk->GOOD('C:\Users\Alan\Desktop\goodlist.txt');
$bulk->bulkmail() || die $bulk->error;

GSD4ME

ASKER

This is all that is in the conversation file when Itry to do a mail send:

Said to server: 'EHLO'
      Server replied: '250-anchor-post-35.mail.xxxx.xxx Hello xxxxxxxx [xx.xxx.xxx.xxx]'
      Server replied: '250-SIZE'
      Server replied: '250-PIPELINING'
      Server replied: '250 HELP'

where I have blanked out the identities f my server and machine

GSD4ME

ASKER

Tintin, many thnaks for your help again.
Have muddled through using a combination of a couple of programs which do the job for me.