I'm hacking some support for DomainKeys and DKIM into an open source email marketing program, which uses a python script to send the actual emails via SMTP. I decided to go the quick and dirty route, and just write a perl script that accepts an email message from STDIN, signs it, then returns it signed.
What I would like to do, is from the python script, pipe the email text that's in a string to the perl script, and store the result in another variable, so I can send the email signed. I'm not exactly a python guru, however, and I can't seem to find a good way to do this. I'm pretty sure I can use something like os.system for this, but piping a variable  to the perl script is something that seems to elude me.
In short: How can I pipe a variable from a python script, to a perl script, and store the result in Python?
EDIT: I forgot to include that the system I'm working with only has python v2.3
I'm sure there's a reason you're going down the route you've chosen, but why not just do the signing in Python?
How are you signing it? Maybe we could provide some assitance in writing a python implementation?
How to call a Perl script from Python, piping input to it?