Re: send-mail-function / mailclient

[Lennart Borgman <lennart.borgman@gmail.com>]

On Tue, Jan 20, 2009 at 9:06 PM, David Reitter <david.reitter@gmail.com> wrote:
> 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).

When this was discussed some time ago a workaround was implemented for
w32. I think this can be used on most platforms.

With this workaround you can edit the data in both Emacs and the mail
client. When you finish editing the mail message in Emacs the users
mail client is started to edit a new mail message. This message has
the subject from Emacs, but the body just says

   *** E-Mail body has been placed on clipboard, please paste them here! ***

This is implemented in mailclient.el