Re: Default of send-mail-function

["Lennart Borgman (gmail)" <lennart.borgman@gmail.com>]

Reiner Steib wrote:
> [ Shifting this to emacs-devel ]
> 
> On Mon, Apr 07 2008, Lennart Borgman (gmail) wrote:
> 
>> Just a question since I do not understand:
>>
>> I told earlier that on w32 this works because the bug reporter falls
>> back to using the system mail program (as an example this in my case
>> Thunderbird). Why can't this be done on other systems as well today?
> 
> On GNU/Linux, send-mail-function typically defaults to
> send-mail-function. [1] I.e. the mail is feed to /usr/sbin/sendmail.
> /usr/sbin/sendmail typically exist on every GNU/Linux systems, however
> on today's end-user desktops, it's quite likely that it has not have
> been configured correctly.
> 
> On system-type darwin and windows-nt, send-mail-function defaults to
> mailclient-send-it which passes the mail to "the system's mail client"
> via a mailto-URL.  If we would use this on gnu/linux as well, it would
> pass the mail to browse-url-browser-function, which is the first one
> installed on the system out of: gnome-moz-remote, mozilla (this should
> be moved down the list and be replace by seamonkey, IMHO), firefox,
> galeon (is galeon still alive?), kfmclient (KDE), etc.  Now it depends
> on whether this *browser* handles mailto-URLs in a sensible way.
> [I hope I understood the code correctly. If not, please correct me.]

Thanks Reiner. On w32 it is however the system that decide which program 
to use. Emacs calls this with w32-shell-execute.

Is there not something similar on GNU/Linux?

> One might argue that this is better then relying on
> /usr/sbin/sendmail.  I'd tend to agree.
> 
> Bye, Reiner.
> 
> [1] Gnus' message.el tries a bit harder to ensure /usr/sbin/sendmail
>     exist.