Re: sendmail.el bug or expected behavior?

[Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca>]

> If the mail gets lost, it is the mailer that loses it.
> That is not Emacs's fault.

Unless Emacs did not give the mailer the tools necessary to report the loss.

> Emacs uses -oem -odb by default (when mail-interactive is nil)
> and that says to start another process to deliver the mail.
> -oem says to send the user mail to report any failure.

If sendmail is unable to deliver *any* mail, then it won't be able to
report the failure either.

> If the mailer obeys those options, you won't lose mail
> without a failure report.

Ian suggested to use -oeq which hands the message to sendmail in the
foreground (with mail-interactive set to t) so sendmail gets a chance to
complain if it has no space in the queue or if there's no queue and no hub,
or if there's no queue and the hub is not accessible.  It should still be
"quick" in that sendmail should as much as possible stash the mail in
a queue and attempt actual delivery later.  If it is too slow, then setting
mail-interactive to nil and do as we do now is the next-best-thing.

> Some seem to be suggesting that when mail-interactive is nil, Emacs
> could use -oem -odb, but even so wait for sendmail to terminate.

My understanding is instead to set mail-interactive to t but change the
args passed to sendmail so it does not immediately attempt to deliver
the message.


        Stefan