emacs-devel
[Top][All Lists]
Advanced

[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

Re: Changing the default for `send-mail-function'


From: Tim Cross
Subject: Re: Changing the default for `send-mail-function'
Date: Tue, 28 Jun 2011 11:14:48 +1000



On Mon, Jun 27, 2011 at 9:07 PM, Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen <address@hidden> wrote:
Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden> writes:

> I think we need to consider 2 use cases here:
>
>  . using Emacs as MUA
>
>  . reporting a bug via "M-x report-emacs-bug"
>
> Both of these are important, but the considerations and the target
> audiences are different.

Good point.

I think the easiest way to handle the second case is to have a
submission server on the gnu.org machines.  The easiest way to do that
would be to just open up the gnu.org MTA on port 587, and point a CNAME
to it, like bug-submission.gnu.org, and have `M-x report-emacs-bug' try
that first.  (The MTA can, for instance, accept email to
address@hidden only.)

It'll work in most (almost all?) cases, and we can try to fall back on
mailclient/etc if it doesn't (if, for instance, the gnu.org MTA is down,
or no longer exists in the future).

This requires the support of the gnu.org mail admins, of course.  :-)

I think there are two weaknesses with this idea. 

Firstly, what happens if the gnu-org mail server or software is down? One of the nice things with mail is it has a little robustness built into it. If you send a message to an address, but the smtp server for that address is not responding, the MTA trying to deliver a message to that server will re-queue the message and try again. It will do this for a number of times before giving up and bouncing back the message. In many cases, it will even notify the sender that the message has been delayed. This functionality would either be lost or we would need to add some additional queueing/retry facilities in the bug submission functionality. 

Secondly, I would be very surprised if the gnu.org admins will be agreeable to this idea. Essentially, you are talking about an open mail server (even though it will only accept/deliver to a single address) and as such, a server that would be open to abuse. To make matters worse, it is a setup that would make many anti-spam techniques difficult/impossible to implement because many of the messages would be coming form IPs without DNS entries, IPs that ISPs often put in blacklists to protect against their systems being abused by spammers, etc. 

We need a good default value which does not depend/require any configuration by the user to addresss the use case highlighted by Eli i.e. emacs users who do not use emacs as a MUA and who will not/do not want to configure MUA components just to be able to send a bug report (most likely won't even realise this need until they want to submit the report). 

For those who do use emacs  as a MUA, it is probably reasonable to expect they are willing to do some configuration work to get it working and requiring them to set mail server and possibly auth info is probably reasonable - it is the first group that are more problematic. 

Tim
 

reply via email to

[Prev in Thread] Current Thread [Next in Thread]