A couple of questions... I'll try to give some comments on the first one:

That HTML mail might look pretty but I would like to encourage you to send plain ascii, but that is just my humble optinion.

Maybe you you want to have a look at MIME::Entity and use it to create a RFC compatible email containing both, a text/plain MIME part and a text/html part for those mail clients that support it. MIME::Entity has a well understandable documentation showing you how you create a mail and finally give it to sendmail.

If you prefer doing that all by yourself, do not forget to set a correct Content-Type in your mail header (look at the headers of some HTML mails you got).

Hope this helps a bit.

alex pleiner <alex@zeitform.de>
zeitform Internet Dienste