Re: Changing the default for `send-mail-function'

[Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org>]

Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> writes:

> That works by calling the system's mailer, which (we can presume)
> has already been configured for the sake of other mail programs.

The other modern mail programs do not use the system's mailer.  If you
send mail via (for instance) Thunderbird, you have to configure the
outgoing SMTP server in Thunderbird.

That is, the other modern mail programs reached the conclusion a few
years back that doing SMTP themselves is easier than relying on the
system being set up to do outgoing SMTP, and I think it's time that
Emacs followed.

> Is there a way Emacs can determine whether mail sending has been
> configured at the system level, and if not, ask the user
> to do so either in Emacs (with smtpmail) or else at system level
> (and use sendmail-send-it)?

Emacs today (on Linux) sees whether there is a sendmail (exim, etc)
installed, and if there is, it assumes that it's capable of doing
outgoing SMTP.  This hasn't actually been true on major Linux
distributions like Ubuntu for a while, so, no, I don't think it's
realistic to find a way to parse the exim (sendmail, postfix) setup to
see whether it actually is able to deliver email to the world.

-- 
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  bloggy blog http://lars.ingebrigtsen.no/