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

[Chong Yidong]

Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen <address@hidden> writes:

> If you install Ubuntu on a new machine, it will install exim, but leave
> exim in local delivery mode only by default.  If you then send email
> from your brand new fresly installed Emacs, it will fail silently.  It
> will call `sendmail-send-it', and exim will take it, and deliver a
> bounce locally.  Which probably won't be seen by the user.
>
> I think that's pretty unacceptable behaviour.

Agreed, though personally I haven't been able to get smtpmail to work
for my university's mail server.  Using smtpmail-send-it with no other
customizations, attempting to send mail returns a "sending failed:
relaying denied" error.

The mail server requires authenticated smtp, which is pretty common
nowadays; for sendmail-send-it, I've got postfix set up for sasl auth.
I see that smtpmail is supposed to support authenticated smtp, but
changing smtpmail-stream-type to `starttls' didn't work, either:

Debugger entered--Lisp error: (error "No process")
  signal(error ("No process"))
  error("No process")
  set-buffer-process-coding-system(raw-text-unix raw-text-unix)
  byte-code(...)
  smtpmail-via-smtp(("address@hidden") #<buffer  smtpmail temp>)
  smtpmail-send-it()
  message-smtpmail-send-it()
  message-send-mail(nil)
  message-send-via-mail(nil)
  message-send(nil)
  message-send-and-exit(nil)

It would be nice to get these issues ironed out if we're gonna be using
smtpmail as the default.