mailclient-send-it usage of browse-url

[Christian Lynbech]

I would like to question the wisdom of letting `mailclient-send-it'
blindly relying on `browse-url' to send mail, especially since this is
set up as the default mail sending client on mac and windows.

After switching back to emacs23 on my powermac, I suddenly started
getting strange behaviour when trying to send mail. I finally pulled
myself together and traced what happened when I tried to send a
message. I was quite surprised to see `browse-url' turn up. I am using
emacs-w3m as my default browser and furthermore have adviced
`browse-url' to automatically switch to my web frame so strange things
was happening.

It is unclear to me why this has never been a problem with Carbon Emacs
and whether there is something screwy in my emacs-w3m setup. I run
identical (and pretty bleeding edge) versions of emacs-w3m and gnus in
both emacs 22 and emacs 23. 

I am certainly not fully on top of how emacs-w3m is supposed to handle
mailto. My `w3m-mailto-url-function' variable is nil and then the
documentation says control goes back to `mail-user-agent' which sort of
looks like the receipe of an infinite loop to me.

It is of course clever to appeal to a system handling of mailto: but
since that OSX comes with a sendmail client, one could argue that we
should do what we do for other unix systems (which I guess uses sendmail
as the default). 

Admittedly, it didn't work out of the box (I needed to also set
`mail-specify-envelope-from' to true) so using mailto may still be a
good idea but shouldn't we then not at least force the choice of
handling agent (ie. call the `open' shell command or the moral
equivalent of `browse-url-safari'). Browse-url seems a shaky foundation
for mail sending given it is anyway not well-specified what it really
points to.


------------------------+-----------------------------------------------------
Christian Lynbech       | christian #\@ defun #\. dk
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Hit the philistines three times over the head with the Elisp reference manual.
                                        - address@hidden (Michael A. Petonic)