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

[chad]

On Apr 15, 2010, at 1:14 AM, <address@hidden> <address@hidden> wrote:

>>>>>> "Stefan" == Stefan Monnier <address@hidden> writes:
> 
> Stefan> The problem is that for most users configuring sendmail is difficult
> 
> This is true but it could be that there are ways of using sendmail where
> one would be less reliant of its configuration.
> 
> This was the situation for me when trying to change to using the
> sendmail client. The default value of `mail-specify-envelope-from' is
> nil meaning that we rely on sendmail to generate the envelope and this
> requires sendmail to be setup correctly which apparently isn't the
> default on OSX. However, by setting the variable to true, emacs
> generates the envelope and now mails are getting delivered since they
> have a legitimate envelope which many mailservers wisely seem to
> require.
> 
> The point I am trying ot make here (without being a great sendmail
> expert) that it may be possible to excert enough external control over
> sendmail to ensure delivery, at least for nodes directly connected to
> the internet. If you are in a situation where you need to authenticate,
> other approaches must be used.
> 
> The biggest problem with sendmail (at least on OSX) is that (as David
> mentioned) it may fail silently. Sendmail will in a number of cases
> happily put the mail into the queue and then fail to deliver it later.

As has previously been mentioned, a great number of users have internet 
connections that cannot use sendmail without arcane configuration, because
their network connection blocks the straightforward connection in an attempt
at spam-bot mitigation.  No emacs default variable will fix this.  The user will
not notice that their mail was dropped into a black hole, because the system 
will not inform them -- it will simply and silently drop the mail.  This is not 
an
abstract concern -- David mentioned that it happened recently that a tester
complained about bug reports going unanswered when in fact his bug reports
were being swallowed by this sort of firewall when the send-mail function was
accidentally set to use sendmail in a beta release.

Until someone writes M-x telepathically-fix-smtp-auth-settings, sendmail cannot
easily be configured by end users.  Until sendmail can easily be configured by 
end users, using `open' is a far, far better choice.

*Chad