Send Gmail With Perl

I don't want to run an MTA on my desktop. MTAs are known vectors for hackers looking for buffer overflows, so leave it the the mail admin or Google to handle it.

But you want the ability to send mail from the command line. It's just so convenient!

cat code.pl | mail -s "The script in question" target@someplace.edu

Beyond that, well, Google has that GMail thing down. Down so well, it's out of Beta. Finally! Large quotas, high availability, POP and IMAP (IMAP is the best!)

Perl to the rescue!

I saw a blog post about sending Gmail email with Perl, using Net::SMTP::TLS. I then decided to write a program that behaves nearly like the mail command line program. (I added a -t flag for Getopt::Long completeness, rather than trying to fish an email address out of @ARGV.)

#!/usr/bin/perl

# usage: cat foo | mail.pl -subject "subject line" -to mail@mail.com

use Modern::Perl ;
use Net::SMTP::TLS ;
use Getopt::Long ;
use IO::Interactive qw{ interactive } ;
use subs qw{ send_mail get_credentials } ;

my %msg ;
my $to  = '' ;
my $cc  = '' ;
my $bcc = '' ;
my $header  = '' ;
my $subject = '' ;
my $body    = '' ;

GetOptions( 'header=s'  => \$header,
            'subject=s' => \$subject,
            'to=s'      => \$to,
            'cc=s'      => \$cc,
            'bcc=s'     => \$bcc,
            ) ;

while ( my $line = <STDIN> ) { $body .= $line ; }

$msg{ body } = $body ;
$msg{ subject } = $subject ;
$msg{ to } = $to ;
$msg{ bcc } = $bcc ;
$msg{ cc } = $cc ;
$msg{ header } = $header ;

send_mail %msg ;

exit ;

sub get_credentials {  
    #this is the point where my setup sucks  
    my %creds ;  
    $creds{ username } = 'NO' ;  
    $creds{ password } = 'A Thousand Times NO' ;  
    return %creds ;  
    }  

sub send_mail {
    my %msg   = @_ ;
    my %creds = get_credentials ;
    my $mailer = new Net::SMTP::TLS(
        'smtp.gmail.com',
        Hello   =>      'smtp.gmail.com',
        Port    =>      587,
        User    =>      $creds{ username } ,
        Password=>      $creds{ password } ,
        );
    $mailer->mail('jacoby.david@gmail.com');
    $mailer->to(  $msg{to} ) ;
    $mailer->cc(  $msg{cc} ) if $msg{cc} =~ /\w/ ;
    $mailer->bcc( $msg{bcc} ) if $msg{bcc} =~ /\w/  ;
    $mailer->data;
    $mailer->datasend( "Subject: $msg{subject} \n" );
    $mailer->datasend( "\n" );
    $mailer->datasend( $msg{body} );
    $mailer->dataend;
    $mailer->quit;
    }

I still do not have the store username and password in a secured config file part done. That's the part waiting for the Google Talk script, the Google status script, the Twitter stuff, etc. If you have ideas, I'd be glad to hear 'em.