Re: sendmail.el bug or expected behavior?

[Simon Josefsson]

Richard Stallman <address@hidden> writes:

>     I suspect that if the MTA is trying to deliver the message to its
>     final destination, then it may hang regardless of what MTA is used.
>
> I would expect people to design an MTAs not to wait very long
> in the process that you created to send the mail.  If sendmail
> does this badly, does that mean they all do?

I guess not.  But how do MTAs implement this, if they don't wait in
the foreground?  Simply storing the e-mail in /var/spool/mqueue and
hope that the system is polling the queue every hour or so might not
be reliable.  This approach also has the disadvantage that any errors
that CAN be detected (and reported to the user) immediately, probably
won't be, since /usr/lib/sendmail will always just push the message on
the queue, without doing any error checking or simple delivery
attempts.

Just some thoughts.