Re: mailclient-send-it usage of browse-url

[Jeff Clough]

<address@hidden> writes:

>>>>>> "Jeff" == Jeff Clough <address@hidden> writes:
>
> Jeff> The problem is that there is not one universal way to ask an operating
> Jeff> system "How do I send a mail message?" and get an honest answer.  Under
> Jeff> Unix, you have tools like sendmail that are virtually guaranteed to be
> Jeff> there.  Under Windows, the Mac and other systems, not so much.
>
> I do not about Windows, but on Mac you can (I believe) rely on the
> *presence* of sendmail just as much as on other UNIX like systems.

With Windows your options are mailclient-send-it and hope for the best
or configure smtpmail-send-it to work.  (This is one item on a very long
list of things that caused my most recent move back to Linux.)

> First of all you somehow need to set up browse-url. If it works out of
> the box, it only does so because somebody took the time to figure what
> the default should be on a Mac. In fact, looking at the default setup
> for browse-url on emacs23 , it does not seem to be working out of the
> box on a Mac. "browse-url.el" will search for a number of programs such
> as firefox or konqueror but not Safari (which is all you can rely on on
> a Mac) and if you do not have any of the browsers in your path (perhaps
> because you use some desktop environment menu rather than setting up
> path), it fails. If you are using emacs-w3m which I think is a quite
> reasonable thing to do, the mailto: hack fails.

It does seem lame that it's not looking for Safari, but then I don't
know if it looks for IE on Windows.  This may be a philosophical point
and not a technical one, so for better or worse it just might not
happen.

> Secondly, browse-url is a user command and while few people may be as
> multi-frame-frenzied as me, there is none the less a significant risk
> that the user has tampered with the command.

I think a case can be made that tampering with a browser-oriented thing
shouldn't break an email-oriented thing when it is not obvious to the
end user that that's what's going to happen.  A case could also be made
that if one knows how to tamper with browse-url, they know how to
configure smtp mail correctly.

> My point is that using `browse-url' is a brittle foundation for an
> otherwise clever hack. 

I don't think this is so much that browse-url is brittle, just that a
case can be made that it should work for the more defaulty browsers.
The overall issue of having Emacs get the right answer to "What is your
mail client?" might still ought to be addressed in a way that doesn't
rely on browsers at all, which may be more possible now than it was
however long ago.

Jeff