Re: smtp crap

[Tim Cross <theophilusx@gmail.com>]

Hi Lars,

putting aside all the excellent work you have put into updating and
improving smtpmail et. al., I think this message possibly sums up the
disconnect in opinions on this issue.

While you are correct that mailclient is a poorer solution for doing
email from within emacs, this overlooks those who in the main don't
want to use emacs for mail, but on occasion, for things like emacs bug
reports, may need/want to. For this class of user, having to setup
emacs mail support is irritating, maybe even annoying. The most likely
already have a configured mail client and it is likely the client they
are most familiar with. For them, mailclient may be a better solution
for those rare occasions they need to initiate an email message from
within emacs.

For those who really do want to use emacs as their mail client, I tend
to agree with Drew in that it is not unreasonable to expect them to
put in the effort to set it up.

This whole debate has a strong feeling of decisions being made by
people based on their own experience/desires and a belief that their
position is a majority perspective. This does not at all reflect my
own personal experience. While I do use emacs a lot as an email
client, most of the people I actually know who also use emacs don't -
in fact, they are somewhat amazed I do or that I bother contributing
to the maintenance of one of the older emacs MUA packages.

Part of the problem here is that we don't really have any idea of what
percentage of emacs users fall into what group. The current changes
appear to be driven by an underlying assumption that a majority of
users also use emacs as their email client.

I wonder if it would be worth analyzing mail header of emacs-devel
posters for a period to get a breakdown. As this would represent a
group of users with a considerable level of investment in emacs, it
would probably only give a rough metric, but would at least be
something to base decisions on rather than the current guesswork and
assumptions.

Tim


On Sun, Oct 9, 2011 at 12:47 AM, Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org> wrote:
> Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:
>
>> Chong and Lars, any objections to changing the default value of
>> send-mail-function to mailclient-send-it for MS-Windows only?
>
> I don't think `mailclient-send-it' is a very satisfactory solution for
> sending email.  It pops up a different mailer, and the user has to take
> actions there, too, to actually send the mail.
>
> And it doesn't support MIME, so you can't add attachments, and so on.
>
> mailclient makes Emacs into a second-rate mail client, which seems
> unfortunate as a default.
>
> --
> (domestic pets only, the antidote for overdose, milk.)
>  bloggy blog http://lars.ingebrigtsen.no/
>
>



-- 
Tim Cross
Phone: 0428 212 217