Re: Outgoing mail defaults

[Simon Josefsson]

Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen <address@hidden> writes:

> I'm wonder whether the defaults when sending email should change.

It should.  Most other MUAs default to SMTP/Submission for sending
e-mails these days.

> I'm thinking:
>
> 1) change the defaults to use smtpmail

Yes, once we got 2)+3) working.

> 2) change smtpmail so that it queries the user for SMTP host name (and
> possibly port number)

I believe port number is crucial: port 25 is often not available, so it
has to go through 587 which actually is the Right Thing to use.

There should be some probing: ask for the hostname and try to contact it
on port 587, if that works, ask for port number and offer 587 as the
default.  If 587 doesn't work, probe port 25 and if that works, offer it
as the default.  If probing doesn't work, just prompt for the port.  The
prompts should ideally contain information about whether the probes
worked or not.

> 3) use customize to save the user's reply

Yes, smtpmail-smtp-server and smtpmail-smtp-service.

> In addition, smtpmail should be altered to use auth-source instead of
> the slightly confusing use-both-auth-source-and-netrc setup it's using
> now, and use `open-protocol-stream' to get opportunistic STARTTLS
> upgrades.

Yep.

> Change 1) is something that will annoy people who have a perfectly good
> local sendmail-like setup, so I'm not absolutely sure that this is the
> way to go.  On the other hand, in the long run (as my Ubuntu experience
> shows), I think it might be the right thing to do, and is what most
> other modern MUAs (like Thunderbird) do.

It may be good to complete 2)+3) first and get user feedback on it.
Maybe smtpmail could be the default in Emacs master to get early
adopters to test it.

/Simon