Sven Joachim <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> Ralf Resack writes:
> You are right. The rationale is given in the patch:
>
> ,----
> | Patch: avoid-fakemail-mail-loss.diff
> | Author: Rob Browning <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> | Added-by: Rob Browning <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> |
> | This fix attempts to avoid a situation where Emacs can silently lose
> | mail. This can occur if sendmail.el (at least) falls back to
> | fakemail, and the underlying binary (MAIL_PROGRAM_NAME) that
> | fakemail is configured to use doesn't exist. Unless
> | mail-interactive is true, Emacs won't wait for the mailer and so
> | won't know that fakemail failed.
> `----
>
> Of course it would be better if fakemail was fixed to not lose mail.
Thanks for the explanation. I don't know about fakemail - what it is
for and when it will be used - to evaluate this situation or to give a
helpful suggestion here.
>> I removed both lines, which
>> works for me. I'm wondering about this error message. If necessary,
>> you might change it also to:
>>
>> (if (not (file-executable-p "/usr/bin/mail"))
>> (message "/usr/bin/mail is not executable"))
>>
>> This gives the user the information without interrupting loading
>> gnus. I hope, this is helpful.
>
> Yes, but such messages easily go by unnoticed, so I'm not certain this
> would be better than the bailing out which is done now.
As I understand the above description by Rob, one could change
mail-interactive to get the needed attention of the user when he tries
to send mail. If that fails, he then can check the *Messages* for the
occuring problem and some hints and will not loose mail.
This wouldn't hit configurations that are not related to the actual
proplem, because Gnus isn't even loading then. Do you think this would
be more appropriate:
(if (not (file-executable-p "/usr/bin/mail"))
(progn
(message "/usr/bin/mail is not executable")
(setq mail-interactive t)))
Or for the special case one uses smtp functionality of Gnus but no MTA
service of the system:
(if (and
(not (eq send-mail-function 'smtpmail-send-it))
(not (file-executable-p "/usr/bin/mail")))
(error "/usr/bin/mail is not executable"))
> Note that your system configuration (lacking an MTA) is rather
> unusual.
I'm just after the first steps walking Linux and don't know yet if I
shot myself in the foot with removing exim. But these threads
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> at gnu.emacs.gnus encouraged me to
do so.
> Anyway, you can easily avoid that by setting sendmail-program in your
> .emacs. The value does not matter, since you are not using it anyway,
> so
> (setq sendmail-program "/bin/false")
>
> would be a good candidate.
I'd prefer the the smtpmail.el without this bail out as a minimal
installation of Debian will have this problem.
Cheers,
Ralf
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