Re: sendmail.el bug or expected behavior?

[Simon Josefsson]

Rob Browning <address@hidden> writes:

> Emacs doesn't always check for a non-zero exit status from sendmail,
> which can lead to silent mail lossage.  For example:
>
>  emacs21 -q
>  [in the *scratch* buffer]
>  (setq sendmail-program "/bin/false") C-j
>  M-x vm-mail RET
>  check that sendmail-program has right value with C-h v
>  fill in a short test message
>  C-c C-c
>  emacs says `Sending...done'
>  (no mail has been sent, of course)
>
> Although from reading mail-interactive's description, I wasn't sure if
> this behavior was a bug or intentional:
>
>   mail-interactive's value is nil
>   Documentation: *Non-nil means when sending a message wait for and
>   display errors.  nil means let mailer mail back a message to report
>   errors.

It is intentional.  I'm not sure it is a good idea, but it has been
discussed before.

> If this isn't just expected behavior, then someone suggested this as a
> fix:

I think the proper fix is to change the default value of
`mail-interactive' to t instead, but I'm not sure there is agreement
to do that.  If you don't like the default behaviour of silently
ignoring exit codes, you can customize the variable as well, no need
to patch the code.

IIRC, the motivation for this is that waiting for /usr/sbin/sendmail
to exit, and thus return an exit code, can take hours with some MTAs
if there is no network connectivity.