Re: sendmail.el bug or expected behavior?

[Ian Jackson <ijackson@chiark.greenend.org.uk>]

Jan D. writes ("Re: sendmail.el bug or expected behavior?"):
> Since the reason not to deliver in the foreground per default is that
> it might hang, changing the MTA timeout for foreground delivery sounds
> like a way forward.  At least you know when things fail.

RFC1123 specifies minimum timeouts for SMTP delivery.  These are
far too long to make a user wait when sending mail.  If a receiving
site is as slow as permitted by the RFC, a single message delivery
will take tens of minutes.

So as I said,
> > Changing the timeouts in your MTA is probably not a good idea (except
> > perhaps as part of configuring it as a hub-based client - see my other
> > mail).

If your MTA is a hub-based client, and you're starting with a normal
MTA, then as well as changing the timeouts you have to disable its
queue (so that -odq and -odb do the same as -odi and so that all
temporary or partial SMTP errors are treated as fatal).  If you do
this then Emacs can safely do -odb -oee as I suggested.

If you don't do this then things will definitely go wrong some of the
time, no matter what Emacs does.

Ian.