4.2.1.1 Standard Mail Methods

Patcher currently supports sendmail, message and Gnus natively and through the compose-mail interface. Other MUA might be partly supported when used with compose-mail. Patcher will probably suffer from non critical deficiencies in that case however (it will issue warnings).

compose-mail

This is the default. It is implemented via the function patcher-mail-compose-mail which calls compose-mail to prepare the message. If you are not familiar with ‘compose-mail’, you might also want to throw an eye to the user option mail-user-agent. If your project does not specify an address to send the message to (see Message Customization), it is prompted for.

sendmail

A direct interface to the mail function from the sendmail package. It is implemented via the function patcher-mail-sendmail. If your project does not specify an address to send the message to (see Message Customization), it is prompted for.

message

A direct interface to the message-mail function from the message library (it is part of Gnus). It is implemented via the function patcher-mail-message. If your project does not specify an address to send the message to (see Message Customization), it is prompted for.

gnus

A direct interface to the gnus-post-news function from the Gnus package (it can also send mails...). It is implemented via the function patcher-mail-gnus. This mail method is interesting when you maintain a special mail group for messages that you send with Patcher, most probably because they are sent to some mailing-list, such as xemacs-patches@xemacs.org.

This method uses a Gnus group name and acts as if you had type ‘C-u a’ on that group in the *Group* buffer, hence honoring the group parameters and posting-styles. If your project does not specify a Gnus group name (see Message Customization), it is prompted for.

This last mail method is special in the sense that it requires a running Gnus session to work. If that's needed, Patcher can start Gnus for you in several ways, according to the following user options:

patcher-mail-run-gnus

If nil, Patcher will never start Gnus and abort the operation instead. If t, Patcher will always start Gnus when needed. If prompt, Patcher will ask you what (you want) to do. This is the default behavior.

patcher-mail-run-gnus-other-frame

Used when Patcher has to start Gnus by itself. If nil, continue using the current frame. If t, start Gnus in another frame (this is the default). If follow, start Gnus in another frame, and use this new frame to prepare the Patcher mail.