Ralf Resack writes: > 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)))
That sounds reasonable to me. Quoting Rob from http://bugs.debian.org/114849 why mail-interactive is nil by default: IIRC, the motivation for this is that waiting for /usr/sbin/sendmail to exit, and thus return an exit code, can take hours with some MTAs if there is no network connectivity. If there is no MTA, this danger probably does not exist. > > Note that your system configuration (lacking an MTA) is rather > > unusual. > > I'm just after the first steps walking Linux And then you are using Debian unstable, even experimental!? I don't know if I should call that brave or reckless. ;-) > 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. No, removing exim is very much _not_ recommended. You don't have to use it to send mail to remote hosts, it can be configured for local mail delivery only, that is very easy in Debian. And if you don't have an MTA, you will not be informed if the cron jobs notice any anomaly on your system, since cron cannot send you mails. > > 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. Well, a minimal installation of Debian does not include Emacs. ;-) Seriously, unless you really know what you are doing you should not remove parts of the Debian base system (i.e. packages that are of priority "important" or higher). Cheers, Sven -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
