Re: batch mode to send an email

[ken <gebser@speakeasy.net>]

Kevin Rodgers wrote:
> ken wrote:
>> Trying to get emacs to send an email.  I've heard other people have
>> gotten this to work and have even been using it.  So I'm hoping I won't
>> have to upgrade anything to accomplish this.
>>
>> I've read a lot of documentation on sending email with emacs.  But what
>> has been hinted at there hasn't yet worked for me (in many years).
>> (Yeah, I used to use gnus, but switched long ago... another story,
>> irrelevant here.)
>>
>> To eliminate the possibility of misconfiguration in ~/.emacs, I'm
>> calling the elisp file from a tiny bash script.  I.e., if the
>> documentation on using emacs in batch mode is correct, ~/.emacs is not
>> read when emacs is called in batch mode.
> 
> That is correct.
> 
>> To lower the bar for emacs as far as possible, at this point in
>> development I'm only asking the elisp script to send something--
>> anything at all, even garbage-- to port 25 on a server we'll call
>> mail.server.tld.  That is, at this point it doesn't have to (though it
>> may and eventually must) specify a local user, a destination email
>> address, subject line and other headers, body of the email.  In order to
>> eliminate as much as possible any misconfiguration which would cause the
>> entire elisp script not to work, at this point I'm only trying to get
>> emacs to do the very first, very smallest step in sending an email in
>> batch mode.  If emacs needs to do more than this in order to function at
>> all, that's fine.  I'm just trying to keep things as absolutely simple
>> as possible.  I'll be delighted if emacs does something that even
>> remotely looks like sending an email.
> 
> (setq send-mail-function 'smtpmail-send-it
>       smtpmail-smtp-server "mail.server.tld")
> 
> (setq mail-default-headers
>       "X-RTFM: Sending Mail; Mail Sending; (smtpmail)Emacs Speaks SMTP\n")
> 
> (mail nil "someuser@somewhere.somedomain" "my favorite subject")
> 
> (insert "Blah, blah, blah.\n")
> 
> (mail-send-and-exit)
> 

Kevin,

Thanks very much for your reply.  But it didn't work.  All I did was
change the destination email address and the mail server to actual,
existing values.

The error I got was:

Wrong number of arguments: #[(arg)
("/usr/share/emacs/21.3/lisp/mail/sendmail.elc" . 21146) nil 2
("/usr/share/emacs/21.3/lisp/mail/sendmail.elc" . 20985) "P"], 0

(all on one line, of course.  My mail client autowraps.)

I commented out ''(mail nil ....)'' and the error went away.

"C-h f mail" says there can be more args, but doesn't say it must.  I'm
not certain how to fix this line.