Question

I’m trying to send an email from a perl script but I’m having a bad time connecting to my SMTP server. I’m using MailCatcher- https://github.com/sj26/mailcatcher/ – running with it’s default settings (localhost:1025).

MailCatcher is running and I can send mail to it with other services. Any clues as to what could be wrong? (Also tried sending a mail with Net::SMTP but that also failed to connect)

print "Testing Mail::Sendmail version $Mail::Sendmail::VERSION\n";

my %mail = (
  To      => '[e-mail]',
  From    => '[e-mail]',     
  Subject => 'Test message'
);

$mail{server} = 'localhost:1025';

$mail{'mESSaGE : '} = "The message key looks terrible, but works.";

print Dumper(%mail);

if (sendmail %mail) { print "Mail sent OK.\n" }
else { print "Error sending mail: $Mail::Sendmail::error \n" }

Output

Testing Mail::Sendmail version 0.79
Default server: localhost
Default sender: 
$VAR1 = 'Subject';
$VAR2 = 'Test message';
$VAR3 = 'server';
$VAR4 = 'localhost:1025';
$VAR5 = 'To';
$VAR6 = '[e-mail]';
$VAR7 = 'message : ';
$VAR8 = 'The message key looks terrible, but works.';
$VAR9 = 'From';
$VAR10 = '[e-mail]';
Error sending mail: connect to localhost failed (Connection refused)
connect to localhost failed
connect to localhost failed (Connection refused)
connect to localhost failed
connect to localhost failed (Connection refused) no (more) retries!

EDIT:

Turned out mailcatcher was running on another port and wasn’t giving an error when I was trying to start it up on 25.

Answer 1

You don’t set the mail server and port in a header within the email; rather you set it in the %mailcfg hash:

use Mail::Sendmail qw(sendmail %mailcfg)
$mailcfg{port} = 1025; #localhost is already the default server...