From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Path: news.gmane.org!not-for-mail From: "Stephen J. Turnbull" Newsgroups: gmane.emacs.devel Subject: Rant - Emacs mail is not user friendly Date: Sat, 15 Nov 2014 20:46:18 +0900 Message-ID: <871tp4wut1.fsf@uwakimon.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp> References: NNTP-Posting-Host: plane.gmane.org Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8 X-Trace: ger.gmane.org 1416052007 3066 80.91.229.3 (15 Nov 2014 11:46:47 GMT) X-Complaints-To: usenet@ger.gmane.org NNTP-Posting-Date: Sat, 15 Nov 2014 11:46:47 +0000 (UTC) Cc: emacs-devel@gnu.org To: Kelly Dean Original-X-From: emacs-devel-bounces+ged-emacs-devel=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Sat Nov 15 12:46:40 2014 Return-path: Envelope-to: ged-emacs-devel@m.gmane.org Original-Received: from lists.gnu.org ([208.118.235.17]) by plane.gmane.org with esmtp (Exim 4.69) (envelope-from ) id 1XpboN-0006h5-Ks for ged-emacs-devel@m.gmane.org; Sat, 15 Nov 2014 12:46:39 +0100 Original-Received: from localhost ([::1]:39929 helo=lists.gnu.org) by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1XpboM-0000fI-Uj for ged-emacs-devel@m.gmane.org; Sat, 15 Nov 2014 06:46:38 -0500 Original-Received: from eggs.gnu.org ([2001:4830:134:3::10]:45392) by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1XpboC-0000fD-Nq for emacs-devel@gnu.org; Sat, 15 Nov 2014 06:46:36 -0500 Original-Received: from Debian-exim by eggs.gnu.org with spam-scanned (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1Xpbo5-0004Ur-7z for emacs-devel@gnu.org; Sat, 15 Nov 2014 06:46:28 -0500 Original-Received: from shako.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp ([130.158.97.161]:34566) by eggs.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1Xpbo4-0004Uc-Ur for emacs-devel@gnu.org; Sat, 15 Nov 2014 06:46:21 -0500 Original-Received: from uwakimon.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp (uwakimon.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp [130.158.99.156]) (using TLSv1 with cipher AES256-SHA (256/256 bits)) (No client certificate requested) by shako.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp (Postfix) with ESMTPS id EA7821C3991; Sat, 15 Nov 2014 20:46:18 +0900 (JST) Original-Received: by uwakimon.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp (Postfix, from userid 1000) id C53E21A2844; Sat, 15 Nov 2014 20:46:18 +0900 (JST) In-Reply-To: X-Mailer: VM undefined under 21.5 (beta34) "kale" acf1c26e3019 XEmacs Lucid (x86_64-unknown-linux) X-detected-operating-system: by eggs.gnu.org: GNU/Linux 3.x X-Received-From: 130.158.97.161 X-BeenThere: emacs-devel@gnu.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.14 Precedence: list List-Id: "Emacs development discussions." List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , Errors-To: emacs-devel-bounces+ged-emacs-devel=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Original-Sender: emacs-devel-bounces+ged-emacs-devel=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Xref: news.gmane.org gmane.emacs.devel:177169 Archived-At: Kelly Dean writes: > Even the worst webmail service I've ever used was more > user-friendly than this, Except that webmail doesn't provide access to configure the message submission process the way feedmail does. And even hackers mostly don't use feedmail. I understand your frustration, but I don't think the source is Emacs. It's that Internet mail is insanely complicated (and powerful to match). You are trying to manually implement some of the complexity that is normally hidden inside the MUA and MTA. In particular, mail queuing is about as complex as things get. MUAs normally delegate queuing to the MTA (that's how I handle disconnected operation on my laptop, for example, and that's the *only* reason I run Postfix on my laptop), and in that sense feedmail.el is a hack. > Yesterday I decided to try using Emacs for email. For sending > messages to my mail server, I'll use a separate program, I'm sure you have good reason for doing that, but that is a very unusual use case. All Emacs MUAs are highly configurable so that they can submit directly to servers (except maybe MH-E, which delegates that function to MH IIRC), and much effort goes into getting that right. The idea of depending a on program that processes a shared queue directory doesn't get the same attention (to say the least). > so I need Emacs just for composing messages, inserting headers > including autogenerated Date and Message-ID headers, encoding file > attachments, and moving completed messages from my drafts folder to > my outbound queue. And you chose Emacs[sic] over which other MUAs capable of being configured to do this? By [sic] I mean that Emacs, in fact, is not an MUA. Rather, it supports at least 5 major ones written in Lisp, plus MH-E which is an Emacs front-end to the MH family of text-based MUAs. To understand the operation of feedmail (or at least the description in the comments in the library) and the baroque suite of interface/configuration variables, it helps to be aware of that background. One issue you seem to have misunderstood is that feedmail.el's queuing feature does *not* seem to be designed for your use case, where the queue will be processed by an external program. Rather, I read the notes to assume that feedmail.el intercepts the message by inserting itself into the send-mail-function hook, then later *reads the queued message into a buffer*, where it invokes the normal function on the message in the queue at user request. That is, the queue is intended to be private to feedmail. That mode of operation could contribute to explaining several of the anomolies you observe (eg, the presence of the header/body separator in the queued message). Bottom line: I think the task you were trying to accomplish is far more complex that you are admitting, and has little to do with "user friendliness" of Emacs MUAs. Regards,