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bug#28902: 25.3; M-x report-emacs-bug requires smtp
From: |
Alexis |
Subject: |
bug#28902: 25.3; M-x report-emacs-bug requires smtp |
Date: |
Fri, 20 Oct 2017 19:15:39 +1100 |
User-agent: |
mu4e 0.9.19; emacs 25.2.1 |
Faré <fahree@gmail.com> writes:
M-x report-emacs-bug tries to send mail from the localhost, but
these
days, due to spam issues, SMTP is not quite as available as it
was say
twenty years ago. Most localhost do not have a mail server; most
ISPs
do not offer SMTP and further block SMTP ports; most servers on
the
internet will not relay mail without authentication; to setup
your own
server requires possessing a domain and a stable server,
altering DNS
records and mastering technologies such as DKIM, DMARC, SPF,
etc.,
that did not exist back in the days when M-x report-emacs-bug
was
originally written.
True. On the other hand, those are not the only possibilities; a
number
of people, such as myself, use a dedicated email service provider,
and
have set up SMTP clients such as `msmtp' to send email via that
provider's SMTP servers.
To remain usable, M-x report-emacs-bug should at the very least
document how one may send the mail via some webmail instead
i might be missing something, but do people think they can't just
copy
and paste the report text into a new email, and send it to the
address
specified in the report buffer's To: field,
i.e. bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org?
or offer to configure emacs (or the underlying system) to offer
some
interface that will bridge the SMTP gap somehow.
The problem is that there are just so many different ways of
setting up
email - not only across operating systems, but also within a given
OS/distro. Even if one settled on, say, using msmtp (rather than,
say,
exim, postfix, esmtp, opensmtpd, sendmail etc.) as the underlying
MTA,
there's still the question of how to actually get that on the
user's
system if it's not already installed:
* Via a package manager? If so, then the various package UIs (apt,
yum,
dnf, YaST, pacman, apk, etc.) need to be taken into
consideration, as
do the various locations that different OSes might put the
various
configuration files. Further, not all users will necessarily
have the
permissions to allow installing arbitrary packages.
* Build it from source? Many users won't have the necessary build
setup
on their machine (or indeed, be able to install the necessary
setup).
* Bundle it with Emacs? Assuming the license allows that, that's
going
to create maintenance burdens in terms of tracking upstream's
bug/security fixes, and e.g. having to release a new version of
Emacs
in order to get a security fix for the MTA onto users' machines.
And then there are the security issues that come with having an
configured MTA available on a machine; it's one thing if someone
is
making use of that MTA for various email needs, it's another if
it's
only being used by Emacs ....
So it seems to me that designing an interface to covering all, or
even
many, of the possibilities would be an /enormous/ task.
Alexis.