Re: send-mail-function / mailclient

[David Reitter <david.reitter@gmail.com>]

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On 20 Jan 2009, at 15:25, Lennart Borgman wrote:

> When this was discussed some time ago a workaround was implemented for
> w32. I think this can be used on most platforms.
>
> With this workaround you can edit the data in both Emacs and the mail
> client. When you finish editing the mail message in Emacs the users
> mail client is started to edit a new mail message. This message has
> the subject from Emacs, but the body just says


That is a clean, working solution.  Any application that sends e-mail  
will have the problem of making users configure mail servers.  Thus, I  
would find it acceptable to use mailclient as default.  It would be  
important to point people to `send-mail-function' when they configure  
the mail servers (i.e. in the appropriate doc strings at least).   It  
is clear that mailclient makes no sense once somebody uses Emacs for  
mail...

Similarly, M-x report-emacs-bug wasn't conceived for such an  
arrangement:

>> - Buffers are edited twice - once in Emacs, and then again in the  
>> mail
>> client.  The mailto:// protocol wasn't designed to handle full  
>> messages to
>> be sent off without editing.  We're abusing the protocol.

Finally:

> - What happens if Emacs is used as mailto:// handler?  At least on my
> system, we don't provide the function directly, but in principle,  
> users
> should be able to do this.  If GNU/Linux has some kind of accepted  
> standard
> to announce "I can handle xxx:// URLs", then perhaps we should  
> implement it
> (for all systems).

Perhaps GNU/Linux doesn't offer a central way to advertise URL  
protocol handlers, but other systems do.  We need a way to set this in  
Emacs 23.2.


However, there seems to be a consensus that mailclient would be the  
right default on all systems now.  Is this agreed?

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