[ Shifting this to emacs-devel ]
On Mon, Apr 07 2008, Lennart Borgman (gmail) wrote:
Just a question since I do not understand:
I told earlier that on w32 this works because the bug reporter falls
back to using the system mail program (as an example this in my case
Thunderbird). Why can't this be done on other systems as well today?
On GNU/Linux, send-mail-function typically defaults to
send-mail-function. [1] I.e. the mail is feed to /usr/sbin/sendmail.
/usr/sbin/sendmail typically exist on every GNU/Linux systems, however
on today's end-user desktops, it's quite likely that it has not have
been configured correctly.
On system-type darwin and windows-nt, send-mail-function defaults to
mailclient-send-it which passes the mail to "the system's mail client"
via a mailto-URL. If we would use this on gnu/linux as well, it would
pass the mail to browse-url-browser-function, which is the first one
installed on the system out of: gnome-moz-remote, mozilla (this should
be moved down the list and be replace by seamonkey, IMHO), firefox,
galeon (is galeon still alive?), kfmclient (KDE), etc. Now it depends
on whether this *browser* handles mailto-URLs in a sensible way.
[I hope I understood the code correctly. If not, please correct me.]