Re: sendmail.el bug or expected behavior?

[Simon Josefsson]

Richard Stallman <address@hidden> writes:

> When mail-interactive is nil, Emacs should not wait.
>
> Many years ago I found that waiting for sendmail to finish took so
> long it was intolerable.  Maybe that has changed; if so, we could
> change the default value of mail-interactive to make Emacs wait
> by default.
>
> What experiences do people have?

It has not changed.  I recall (someone please correct me if I
misremember) the XEmacs version of sendmail.el actually did change the
default, just because the current situation can lead to lost mail, but
it was quickly reverted because of the lockups.  This was just a few
years (1-2) ago.

Another solution may be to make sendmail.el more asynchronous, so it
can wait for sendmail to exit in the background, and then possibly
report the error code.  But this may not work well if
/usr/lib/sendmail hangs for hours, which appears to sometimes be the
case, because the user might quit emacs before sendmail finishes.