Using getpwnam() with CGI

I am trying to create a script to install spam filters on a per user basis.
The script will have a web UI where the user should be able to login and
enable or disable the filters.  My original script, which was a command-line
perl script, used User::pwent getpwnam() to get the user's encrypted
password from the shadow file and compare it with the encrypted password
that the user submitted.  This worked perfectly.  Unfortunately, when I run
it from a command line, the passwd object passed by getpwnam() is always 'x'
which it is grabbing from the passwd file.  Does anyone know how I can fix
this?

Here are the important parts of the code:

#!/usr/bin/suidperl -U
$current_id = $<; #get the current user id
 my($name,$passwd,$uid,$gid,$quota,$comme
nt,$gcos,$dir,$shell) =
getpwnam("root"); #get user nobody's details
$< = $uid;

use User::pwent;
use CGI qw(:standard);
use CGI::Carp qw(fatalsToBrowser);

sub authUser {
# set sub variables
my($username,$userpass,$password) = @_;
if ( crypt($password,$userpass) eq $userpass ) {
return 1;
} else {
return 0;
}
}

...

# Set UserInfo
my $user = getpwnam($mailbox);
my $username = $user->name;
my $userpass = $user->passwd;
my $userdir  = $user->dir;
my $useruid  = $user->uid;
my $usergid  = $user->gid;


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Thanks,
Jason Williard