Re: sendmail.el bug or expected behavior?

[Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org>]

    Currently there are large numbers of places where Emacs sometimes
    loses mail !

If the mail gets lost, it is the mailer that loses it.
That is not Emacs's fault.
Emacs uses -oem -odb by default (when mail-interactive is nil)
and that says to start another process to deliver the mail.
-oem says to send the user mail to report any failure.
If the mailer obeys those options, you won't lose mail
without a failure report.

Some seem to be suggesting that when mail-interactive is nil, Emacs
could use -oem -odb, but even so wait for sendmail to terminate.  I
think that is what we used to do; but Emacs often had to wait for a
substantial time, and I found that intolerable.  Perhaps nowadays
the wait will be smaller and acceptable.  So people might want to
try this change and see if it is fast enough.

*** sendmail.el.~1.274.~	Sat Jan  3 09:10:43 2004
--- sendmail.el	Tue Jan 27 13:04:02 2004
***************
*** 820,826 ****
    (require 'mail-utils)
    (let ((errbuf (if mail-interactive
  		    (generate-new-buffer " sendmail errors")
! 		  0))
  	(tembuf (generate-new-buffer " sendmail temp"))
  	(multibyte enable-multibyte-characters)
  	(case-fold-search nil)
--- 820,826 ----
    (require 'mail-utils)
    (let ((errbuf (if mail-interactive
  		    (generate-new-buffer " sendmail errors")
! 		  nil0))
  	(tembuf (generate-new-buffer " sendmail temp"))
  	(multibyte enable-multibyte-characters)
  	(case-fold-search nil)