Re: [david.reitter@gmail.com: mailclient.el - revised]

[Jason Rumney <jasonr@gnu.org>]

David Reitter wrote:

> On 24 Jul 2005, at 15:46, Lennart Borgman wrote:
>
>>  However it should not depend on the mail client used. In w32 there  
>> is a problem with the parameter length when passing the URL to w32.  
>> I have done a workaround placing data on the clipboard.  Otherwise  
>> (browse-url ...) for the "mailto:..." URL is used just as in your  
>> original code.
>
>
> I don't think placing data on the clipboard and asking the user to  
> copy it over would be the ideal solution. Using MAPI (instead of  
> mailclient) seems to be the correct way to do things on Windows.

MAPI is a proprietary API for proprietary mail clients on a proprietary 
OS. It is not the "correct" way for anything. Free mail clients such as 
Emacs, Mozilla Thunderbird and others are not supported by MAPI.

mailto: urls are an open standard. They can be made to work with any 
mail client that has a command-line interface, even Emacs (see the Emacs 
on Windows FAQ). If there are limitations with them on Windows, then 
that is something that Windows users have to live with. What Lennart 
suggested seems like a good comprimise, even if not ideal, but itshould 
be conditioned on whether the user has customized send-mail-function, 
since there is a high chance that Emacs will be able to send mail (using 
smtpmail.el for example) if the user has configured it to (this applies 
to Mac as well). This may be the case already, I haven't studied the 
code you wrote.