mailx <-> smail incompatibilities

[Karl Kleinpaste]

riddle at woton.UUCP writes:
   (1) I would like to eliminate a long list of mail aliases from mailx's
   "mailx.rc" file and put them instead in smail's "/usr/lib/aliases"
   file, since smail is more flexible in its aliasing scheme and can
   expand aliases in incoming network mail which mailx never sees. 

   Unfortunately there's a hitch: if a user types "mailx foobar" where
   "foobar" is an smail alias, mailx notices that there is no user
   "foobar" on the system and exits with the error message "Can't send to
   foobar".  However, if the user types "mailx woton!foobar" then mailx is
   content to defer the interpretation of what it thinks is a network
   address to the mail delivery program. 

That's a misfeature on the part of the latest release of mailx.
Defeat the misfeature by including `set sendmail=/bin/mail' in
/usr/lib/mailx/mailx.rc and the problem goes away, since mailx assumes
that if you have something willing to identify itself as `sendmail,'
it must have the guts to deal with an `unreal' user address.

You may also find it worthwhile to add `set noaddsopt' to mailx.rc for
reasons that become obvious after trying to deal with domain addresses.

   (I'm encouraged by the fact that
   I've also installed smail on our 3B1 UNIX PCs and haven't noticed this
   problem with the 3B1 version of mailx.)

3B1s are running an older incarnation of mailx, without the misfeature.

   (2) Has anyone noticed a case of mailx developing indigestion when
   replying to mail sent by smail?

Sorry, I've not seen that one.  We're running V.3.0 on our 3B2s.

--Karl