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

[Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen]

Richard Stallman <address@hidden> writes:

> Emacs now has `mail-interactive' default to t.  Why does `sendmail'
> fail silently if it cannot deliver the message?  Why doesn't
> `sendmail-send-it' detect the failure and report it?

Emacs forks off the "sendmail" program, which takes the message, and
feeds it to exim, which says "ok", and then generates a bounce message.

> Why won't the user see the bounce message?  If the bounce message is
> delivered locally to the user, why won't Emacs mail readers show it?

Most people don't get mail delivered to their local machine, so there's
no reason for them to look for mail locally.

> For instance, when exim is configured for local delivery only, we
> should make `sendmail' fail quickly for any address with an @ in it,
> thus giving Emacs the chance to report the error properly.

If you know of a way to make most of the common GNU/Linux distributions
work in this manner, I'm all ears.

-- 
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  bloggy blog http://lars.ingebrigtsen.no/