Perl Mail::Mailer not working - perl

Question

I'm new to using modules in Perl. My head is exploding right now and i would like to know what is wrong in here:
#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use Mail::Mailer;
my $from_adress = "email\#xxxxx.com";
my $to_adress = "email\#hxxxx.com";
my $subject = "There goes bananas\n";
my $body = "Here is the bananas";
my $server = "smtp.gmail.com";
my $mailer = Mail::Mailer->new("smtp", Server => $server);
$mailer->open({
From => $from_adress,
To => $to_adress,
Subject => $subject,
});
print $mailer $body;
$mailer->close();
open(F, '>>', $Mail::Mailer::testfile::config{outfile});
print F #_;
print #_;
close (F);
Sorry to post the whole script but i'm not sure where it went wrong. I don't get any print from #_ variable. I would love to receive advises on how to improve in using modules in Perl and how i can get better at it.
Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Well done for using strict in your code. For extra credit, add a use warnings line too.
I can't see any obvious problems with the way you're using the module. Do you think there's something wrong? Is the email not being sent?
If you're not getting the email, then I'd suggest that your first step should be to follow the example in the documentation and change the close line to:
$mailer->close
or die "couldn't send whole message: $!\n";
I wonder if the problem (if there is one) is that you're using Google's SMTP server and you don't have permission to do that. Perhaps you need to authenticate first.
A few other points about your code.
There is no need for all of your set-up variables to be initialised with double-quoted strings. And if you switch to single-quoted strings then you no longer need to escape the #s in the data. You would need double quotes to put the newline in $subject, but I've removed that as email subject lines rarely contain newlines.
my $from_adress = 'email#xxxxx.com';
my $to_adress = 'email#hxxxx.com';
my $subject = 'There goes bananas';
my $body = 'Here is the bananas';
my $server = 'smtp.gmail.com';
The last four lines of your code are confusing in many ways. I'm not really sure what you're trying to achieve there. I'll point out two things though. Firstly, we generally use lexical filehandles these days. If you're learning from a source that uses bareword filehandles, then I'd worry slightly about its age. So the file opening line should look like this:
# $f is, of course, a terrible name for a variable
open(my $f, '>>', $Mail::Mailer::testfile::config{outfile});
You are then printing the value of #_. In Perl, #_ contains the arguments to a subroutine. And this code isn't inside a subroutine, so #_ will be empty. So I'm not surprised that you're not getting any output.
Lastly, I'll point out that I find that I enjoy working with email in Perl a lot more when I'm using tools from the Email::* namespace. In particular, I'd use Email::Sender for sending email.
Update: Ok, I've had a closer look at the Mail::Mailer documentation and I think I understand what you're trying to do in the last four lines. I think you're trying to write the mail message data to the file. Is that right?
If it is, then you're misunderstanding the documentation. The way to do that is to change the type that you pass to new(). It needs to be testfile rather than smtp. So change
my $mailer = Mail::Mailer->new("smtp", Server => $server);
to
my $mailer = Mail::Mailer->new("testfile",);
That will write the mail to a file called mailer.testfile and no mail will be sent.