 | CGI Programming with Perl |  |
mailx and mail are other popular options for sending email. Some people even argue that they are more secure than sendmail. It is true that because sendmail is such a large, complicated program, and because it runs as root, it has been the source of a number of security holes over the years. However, the notion that it is a less secure option in CGI scripts is a dubious one. One serious problem with mailx and mail is that they allow tilde escapes: any line in the body of the message beginning with ~! is executed as a command. Many versions do attempt to detect whether they are being run by a user on a terminal and disable tilde escapes otherwise, but this is a serious potential risk.
A second problem with mailx and mail is that they offer nothing comparable to sendmail 's -t option. Thus, if you want to use mail, for example, you must use the fork and exec trick we described in the last chapter:
open MAIL "|-" or exec( "/bin/mail", $email ) or
die "Cannot exec mail $!";Finally, mailx and mail also lack the useful options we discussed with sendmail, such as overriding the sender.
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| 9.4. sendmail |  | 9.6. Perl Mailers |
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