On Mon, Jun 27, 2011 at 9:07 PM, Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org>wrote:

> Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:
>
> > I think we need to consider 2 use cases here:
> >
> >  . using Emacs as MUA
> >
> >  . reporting a bug via "M-x report-emacs-bug"
> >
> > Both of these are important, but the considerations and the target
> > audiences are different.
>
> Good point.
>
> I think the easiest way to handle the second case is to have a
> submission server on the gnu.org machines.  The easiest way to do that
> would be to just open up the gnu.org MTA on port 587, and point a CNAME
> to it, like bug-submission.gnu.org, and have `M-x report-emacs-bug' try
> that first.  (The MTA can, for instance, accept email to
> bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org only.)
>
> It'll work in most (almost all?) cases, and we can try to fall back on
> mailclient/etc if it doesn't (if, for instance, the gnu.org MTA is down,
> or no longer exists in the future).
>
> This requires the support of the gnu.org mail admins, of course.  :-)
>
> I think there are two weaknesses with this idea.

Firstly, what happens if the gnu-org mail server or software is down? One of
the nice things with mail is it has a little robustness built into it. If
you send a message to an address, but the smtp server for that address is
not responding, the MTA trying to deliver a message to that server will
re-queue the message and try again. It will do this for a number of times
before giving up and bouncing back the message. In many cases, it will even
notify the sender that the message has been delayed. This functionality
would either be lost or we would need to add some additional queueing/retry
facilities in the bug submission functionality.

Secondly, I would be very surprised if the gnu.org admins will be agreeable
to this idea. Essentially, you are talking about an open mail server (even
though it will only accept/deliver to a single address) and as such, a
server that would be open to abuse. To make matters worse, it is a setup
that would make many anti-spam techniques difficult/impossible to implement
because many of the messages would be coming form IPs without DNS entries,
IPs that ISPs often put in blacklists to protect against their systems being
abused by spammers, etc.

We need a good default value which does not depend/require any configuration
by the user to addresss the use case highlighted by Eli i.e. emacs users who
do not use emacs as a MUA and who will not/do not want to configure MUA
components just to be able to send a bug report (most likely won't even
realise this need until they want to submit the report).

For those who do use emacs  as a MUA, it is probably reasonable to expect
they are willing to do some configuration work to get it working and
requiring them to set mail server and possibly auth info is probably
reasonable - it is the first group that are more problematic.

Tim