Re: Outgoing mail defaults

[Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org>]

Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org> writes:

> I'm thinking:
>
> 1) change the defaults to use smtpmail
>
> 2) change smtpmail so that it queries the user for SMTP host name (and
> possibly port number)
>
> 3) use customize to save the user's reply

I was thinking about starting to implement this stuff (with 1) last :-),
and one problem occurred to me:  Should Emacs do something with mail
delivery failures?

I'm thinking mainly about transient failures and "failures" like
greylisting.  Currently (on Linux), since the mail defaults to using the
local MTA, it handles this quite well.  (Well, if you have a local MTA,
which modern Linux installations don't have, by default.)

So would it make sense to put in a simple MTA layer in Emacs itself?
That is, an mta.el library that's on top of smtpmail.el, which checks
for transient failures (4xx, I think), queues stuff up, and tries
resending in the background?

Or is that too brittle?  If you're not running Emacs, your message will
just be sitting in the queue.  Currently, if Message gets a "450"
(greylisting) error, it'll report the error, and you have to try again
later manually.

So I'm not sure what would be best here.  Opinions?

-- 
(domestic pets only, the antidote for overdose, milk.)
  bloggy blog http://lars.ingebrigtsen.no/