Re: send-mail-function / mailclient

[David Reitter <david.reitter@gmail.com>]

On 19 Jan 2009, at 23:52, Stefan Monnier wrote:

>> On the downside, I find that sending mail Postfix-style does not  
>> work as
>> well as it used to, due to crippled mail servers that refuse to   
>> accept mail
>> from dynamic IP ranges (i.e. home broadband) as a spam-
>> defense.
>
> Yes, that's the problem.  Nowadays, "systems" are basically not  
> allowed
> to email any more, only "users".  So using `postfix' (which is not
> under the control of a user. but only under the control of the system)
> doesn't cut it.

In order to use the `mailclient' method on all systems, we should  
consider the following issues:

- some incorrect implementations of mail clients (notably GMail  
Notifier) fails to handle long URLs.  In the case of Gmail it seems to  
be the server software that cuts off long URLs (intentionally, I  
assume).  You may argue that this is a bug in these "mail clients",  
but that doesn't help our users.  I have received several bug reports  
from Aquamacs users regarding this and I now use a workaround that  
falls back to the "sendmail" method if Gmail is used.

- Buffers are edited twice - once in Emacs, and then again in the mail  
client.  The mailto:// protocol wasn't designed to handle full  
messages to be sent off without editing.  We're abusing the protocol.   
Sending bug reports may best be handled by composing the template and  
then having users edit the report in their preferred mail client.   
Sending e-mail with packages such as VM requires user to configure an  
SMTP server anyways, so `send-mail-function' can be expected to be  
customized,too.

- What happens if Emacs is used as mailto:// handler?  At least on my  
system, we don't provide the function directly, but in principle,  
users should be able to do this.  If GNU/Linux has some kind of  
accepted standard to announce "I can handle xxx:// URLs", then perhaps  
we should implement it (for all systems).