order of sending mail and saving to fcc

[Derek Martin]

On Tue, Jun 11, 2019 at 10:04:25PM +1000, Erik Christiansen wrote:
> In the event that send fails, the local copy is essential for a resend
> attempt. No ifs, no buts, no maybes. I'm at a loss to imagine any
> scenario in which mutt should risk inability to write that Fcc, through a
> hang-up or conniption during sending.

This argument seems like complete nonsense to me...  if the send
fails, you're left back at the compose screen.  If by some
unbelievable coincidence the send fails AND you lose power before you
can do something about it, this is NO DIFFERENT than if the power went
out just before you finished composing the message.  It's not your
mail client's job to protect you from every conceibable system failure
which might cause data loss, nor should it be.  And for every other
case, the current behavior is the far superior one because it can not
mislead you into thinking you sent a message you did not, and does not
lead to the various encoding issues Kevin mentioned separately. 

But also, just because the message failed to send, your ideas and the
impetus for writing them down didn't vanish.  Your brain is the
back-up.  In the event that the message in question is the unusual
combination of lengthy, complex, and important enough that the pain of
re-composing it from scratch is somehow prohibitive, then you damn
well better be composing it using a word processor that takes frequent
snapshots of your document as you compose, and then sending it as an
attachment (or as a link, or by doing a text conversion, or...
whatever)--not relying on your mail client to preserve it.  And by the
way even then, you can't guarantee 100% that you won't lose the data.
Your hard disk could explode, say due to a lightning strike.  No
software can't protect you from that.  At a certain point such
considerations become completely ridiculous.

I hesitate to go far as to say that if you think saving the message
first is the right behavior, you are simply wrong... but I'm
definitely thinking it. =8^)

-- 
Derek D. Martin    http://www.pizzashack.org/   GPG Key ID: 0xDFBEAD02
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