Re: sendmail.el bug or expected behavior?

[Ian Jackson]

Jan D. writes ("Re: sendmail.el bug or expected behavior?"):
> This may not do the right thing.  It is not uncommon to not run any
> sendmail daemon, but just forward everything to another host.  If we
> do it like this, the mail will never be delivered, but sit in the
> queue forever.

There is no reliable way for Emacs to prevent /usr/lib/sendmail from
choosing to sit on the mail, if that's what it's configured by the
sysadmin to do.  Consider an installation whose mail hub is
temporarily down.

System administrators can avoid this kind of grief by installing (or
configuring) an implementation of /usr/lib/sendmail which always
immediately delivers to the mail hub (by SMTP or otherwise) and has no
queue.  Requiring this is not a problem because all mail-sending
programs on the client machine need the same behaviour.

Ian.