Re: address@hidden: mailclient.el - revised]

[David Reitter]

On 28 Jul 2005, at 13:24, Jason Rumney wrote:
> MAPI is a proprietary API for proprietary mail clients on a  
> proprietary OS. It is not the "correct" way for anything. Free mail  
> clients such as Emacs, Mozilla Thunderbird and others are not  
> supported by MAPI.
>
> mailto: urls are an open standard. They can be made to work with  
> any mail client that has a command-line interface, even Emacs (see  
> the Emacs on Windows FAQ). If there are limitations with them on  
> Windows, then that is something that Windows users have to live with.

It seems that you misunderstand what the task is that we're trying to  
achieve. That is, to send off an e-mail without further interaction.  
mailto URLs are an open standard, but they are a standard for the  
wrong thing. They should be adopted when there is no other  
possibility, as is the case on Mac OS X / Darwin (in default  
configuration). So on OS X, we need a workaround - one that actually  
provides a useful functionality on all systems provided mailto URLs  
are fully supported.

Unless I'm mistaken here, MAPI offers a way to send off e-mails  
without user interaction. Hundreds of viruses have used this API on  
Windows, so it must be there :) For that functionality, MAPI dlls  
seem to take on the responsibilities that we would normally expect  
from sendmail.

Why is MAPI proprietary?  I mean, the idea is that mail clients can  
support their own mapi32.dll, right? So the API is open and  
documented, correct? And in fact, the very non-proprietary mail  
client Mozilla Thunderbird seems to implement it...

Apart from that, even if you're using functions for which you don't  
have source and the usual freedoms - how do you justify using the  
Win32API that makes windows pop up or sends a document to the printer?


> What Lennart suggested seems like a good comprimise, even if not  
> ideal, but itshould be conditioned on whether the user has  
> customized send-mail-function, since there is a high chance that  
> Emacs will be able to send mail (using smtpmail.el for example) if  
> the user has configured it to (this applies to Mac as well). This  
> may be the case already, I haven't studied the code you wrote.

Yes, they should depend on send-mail-function, and it seems to me  
that you haven't really read the thread, since 'mailclient-send-it  
for send-mail-function is what others and I have been suggesting all  
along.