Just one important question, jam: Are you using a free host for your site? If so, bear in mind that if they ever decide to disable PHP, the form will become unusable and you would have no recourse but to switch hosts.

There have been a couple of times where I've spent many hours building elaborate websites, including forms, that required PHP to function correctly, only to have the (free) host yank PHP because users started abusing the system and hogging resources.

By the way, PERL is said to be much more difficult to master than PHP but it's also said to be better by those "in the know". So, if you think you're up to it, more power to you! ;-)