Default of send-mail-function (was: 23.0.60; Feature request: Menu item "load init files" after -q/-Q)

[Reiner Steib]

[ Shifting this to emacs-devel ]

On Mon, Apr 07 2008, Lennart Borgman (gmail) wrote:

> Just a question since I do not understand:
>
> I told earlier that on w32 this works because the bug reporter falls
> back to using the system mail program (as an example this in my case
> Thunderbird). Why can't this be done on other systems as well today?

On GNU/Linux, send-mail-function typically defaults to
send-mail-function. [1] I.e. the mail is feed to /usr/sbin/sendmail.
/usr/sbin/sendmail typically exist on every GNU/Linux systems, however
on today's end-user desktops, it's quite likely that it has not have
been configured correctly.

On system-type darwin and windows-nt, send-mail-function defaults to
mailclient-send-it which passes the mail to "the system's mail client"
via a mailto-URL.  If we would use this on gnu/linux as well, it would
pass the mail to browse-url-browser-function, which is the first one
installed on the system out of: gnome-moz-remote, mozilla (this should
be moved down the list and be replace by seamonkey, IMHO), firefox,
galeon (is galeon still alive?), kfmclient (KDE), etc.  Now it depends
on whether this *browser* handles mailto-URLs in a sensible way.
[I hope I understood the code correctly. If not, please correct me.]

One might argue that this is better then relying on
/usr/sbin/sendmail.  I'd tend to agree.

Bye, Reiner.

[1] Gnus' message.el tries a bit harder to ensure /usr/sbin/sendmail
    exist.
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