bug#28902: 25.3; M-x report-emacs-bug requires smtp

bug#28902: 25.3; M-x report-emacs-bug requires smtp

[Faré]

M-x report-emacs-bug tries to send mail from the localhost, but these
days, due to spam issues, SMTP is not quite as available as it was say
twenty years ago. Most localhost do not have a mail server;
most ISPs do not offer SMTP and further block SMTP ports;
most servers on the internet will not relay mail without authentication;
to setup your own server requires possessing a domain and a stable
server, altering DNS records and mastering technologies
such as DKIM, DMARC, SPF, etc., that did not exist back in the days
when M-x report-emacs-bug was originally written.
To remain usable, M-x report-emacs-bug should at the very least
document how one may send the mail via some webmail instead, or
offer to configure emacs (or the underlying system) to offer
some interface that will bridge the SMTP gap somehow.


In GNU Emacs 25.3.1 (x86_64-pc-linux-gnu, GTK+ Version 3.22.21)
 of 2017-10-05 built on localhost
Windowing system distributor 'The X.Org Foundation', version 11.0.11903000
Configured using:
 'configure --disable-dependency-tracking
 --prefix=/nix/store/mzd9pa3gs3hi6qy73w8hqv4zlilfka18-emacs-25.3
 --with-modules --with-x-toolkit=gtk3 --with-xft'

Configured features:
XPM JPEG TIFF GIF PNG RSVG SOUND DBUS GSETTINGS NOTIFY LIBSELINUX GNUTLS
LIBXML2 FREETYPE XFT ZLIB TOOLKIT_SCROLL_BARS GTK3 X11 MODULES

Important settings:
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/nix/store/js6f93ihr2crmijhi7j0ql9nszdszjsz-emacs-packages-deps/share/emacs/site-lisp:
  value of $LC_CTYPE: en_US.UTF-8
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  locale-coding-system: utf-8

Major mode: Message

Minor modes in effect:
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  abbrev-mode: t

Recent messages:
Saving file /home/fare/*message*-20171019-114620...
Wrote /home/fare/*message*-20171019-114620
No server buffers remain to edit
Mark set
Quit [2 times]
next-line: End of buffer [3 times]
Mark activated
Quit
Mark set [3 times]
Auto-saving...done
Quit

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--
—♯ƒ • François-René ÐVB Rideau •Reflection&Cybernethics• http://fare.tunes.org
To converse at the distance of the Indes by means of sympathetic contrivances
may be as natural to future times as to us is a literary correspondence.
  — Joseph Glanvill, 1661

bug#28902: 25.3; M-x report-emacs-bug requires smtp

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Faré <fahree@gmail.com>
> Date: Thu, 19 Oct 2017 12:10:35 -0400
> 
> M-x report-emacs-bug tries to send mail from the localhost, but these
> days, due to spam issues, SMTP is not quite as available as it was say
> twenty years ago. Most localhost do not have a mail server;
> most ISPs do not offer SMTP and further block SMTP ports;
> most servers on the internet will not relay mail without authentication;
> to setup your own server requires possessing a domain and a stable
> server, altering DNS records and mastering technologies
> such as DKIM, DMARC, SPF, etc., that did not exist back in the days
> when M-x report-emacs-bug was originally written.
> To remain usable, M-x report-emacs-bug should at the very least
> document how one may send the mail via some webmail instead, or
> offer to configure emacs (or the underlying system) to offer
> some interface that will bridge the SMTP gap somehow.

This is bug#28154, and someone is hopefully working on it.

Thanks.

bug#28902: 25.3; M-x report-emacs-bug requires smtp

[Alexis]

Faré <fahree@gmail.com> writes:

> M-x report-emacs-bug tries to send mail from the localhost, but 
> these
> days, due to spam issues, SMTP is not quite as available as it 
> was say
> twenty years ago. Most localhost do not have a mail server; most 
> ISPs
> do not offer SMTP and further block SMTP ports; most servers on 
> the
> internet will not relay mail without authentication; to setup 
> your own
> server requires possessing a domain and a stable server, 
> altering DNS
> records and mastering technologies such as DKIM, DMARC, SPF, 
> etc.,
> that did not exist back in the days when M-x report-emacs-bug 
> was
> originally written.

True. On the other hand, those are not the only possibilities; a 
number
of people, such as myself, use a dedicated email service provider, 
and
have set up SMTP clients such as `msmtp' to send email via that
provider's SMTP servers.

> To remain usable, M-x report-emacs-bug should at the very least
> document how one may send the mail via some webmail instead

i might be missing something, but do people think they can't just 
copy
and paste the report text into a new email, and send it to the 
address
specified in the report buffer's To: field, 
i.e. bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org?

> or offer to configure emacs (or the underlying system) to offer 
> some
> interface that will bridge the SMTP gap somehow.

The problem is that there are just so many different ways of 
setting up
email - not only across operating systems, but also within a given
OS/distro. Even if one settled on, say, using msmtp (rather than, 
say,
exim, postfix, esmtp, opensmtpd, sendmail etc.) as the underlying 
MTA,
there's still the question of how to actually get that on the 
user's
system if it's not already installed:

* Via a package manager? If so, then the various package UIs (apt, 
  yum,
  dnf, YaST, pacman, apk, etc.) need to be taken into 
  consideration, as
  do the various locations that different OSes might put the 
  various
  configuration files. Further, not all users will necessarily 
  have the
  permissions to allow installing arbitrary packages.

* Build it from source? Many users won't have the necessary build 
  setup
  on their machine (or indeed, be able to install the necessary 
  setup).

* Bundle it with Emacs? Assuming the license allows that, that's 
  going
  to create maintenance burdens in terms of tracking upstream's
  bug/security fixes, and e.g. having to release a new version of 
  Emacs
  in order to get a security fix for the MTA onto users' machines.

And then there are the security issues that come with having an
configured MTA available on a machine; it's one thing if someone 
is
making use of that MTA for various email needs, it's another if 
it's
only being used by Emacs ....

So it seems to me that designing an interface to covering all, or 
even
many, of the possibilities would be an /enormous/ task.


Alexis.

bug#28902: 25.3; M-x report-emacs-bug requires smtp

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Alexis <flexibeast@gmail.com>
> Date: Fri, 20 Oct 2017 19:15:39 +1100
> Cc: 28902@debbugs.gnu.org
> 
> i might be missing something, but do people think they can't just 
> copy
> and paste the report text into a new email, and send it to the 
> address
> specified in the report buffer's To: field, 
> i.e. bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org?

I believe the improvement someone said they will be working on was to
copy the text into the system clipboard and tell the user to paste it
from their into their favorite email client.  See
https://debbugs.gnu.org/cgi/bugreport.cgi?bug=28154#5.