Outgoing mail defaults

[Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen]

I'm wonder whether the defaults when sending email should change.

I recently got a new laptop and installed Ubuntu on it.  I fired up
Emacs and tried sending mail, as one does, and it failed.

`message-send-mail-function' returned `message-send-mail-with-sendmail',
since Ubuntu does come with a functioning sendmail program, but it
refused to actually send any mail.

So I'm wondering whether Emacs should default to using smtpmail.  The
nice thing about using smtpmail is that Emacs has explicit control of
how the mail is sent, which is more important now than it used to be,
what with all the closed port 25s that ISP like to give their customers
these days.

I'm thinking:

1) change the defaults to use smtpmail

2) change smtpmail so that it queries the user for SMTP host name (and
possibly port number)

3) use customize to save the user's reply

In addition, smtpmail should be altered to use auth-source instead of
the slightly confusing use-both-auth-source-and-netrc setup it's using
now, and use `open-protocol-stream' to get opportunistic STARTTLS
upgrades.

Change 1) is something that will annoy people who have a perfectly good
local sendmail-like setup, so I'm not absolutely sure that this is the
way to go.  On the other hand, in the long run (as my Ubuntu experience
shows), I think it might be the right thing to do, and is what most
other modern MUAs (like Thunderbird) do.

-- 
(domestic pets only, the antidote for overdose, milk.)
  address@hidden * Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen