mailx <-> smail incompatibilities

[Robert N. Berlinger]

In article <1040 at woton.UUCP>, riddle at woton.UUCP (Prentiss Riddle ) writes:
> (1) ...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. ...
> 
> (2) Has anyone noticed a case of mailx developing indigestion when
> replying to mail sent by smail? 

In answer to (1) -- put "set sendmail=/bin/smail" into /usr/lib/mailx/mailx.rc.
That tells mailx that there is a "non-standard" mailer and it doesn't
perform the pre-validation.  Aliases work fine.

(2) is more of a hard problem -- there are many bugs in mailx relating
to domain style addressing (not even fixed in 3.0!).  We live with them
(don't use 'r' but manually enter the reply address).  That's quality
software for you.
-- 
Robert N. Berlinger		    |        /------Preferred-------\
Supervisor of Systems Support	    |Domain: | naftoli at aecom.yu.edu |
Scientific Computing Center	    |UUCP: {philabs,cucard,ihnp4}!aecom!naftoli
Albert Einstein College of Medicine |CompuServe: 73047,741 GEnie: R.Berlinger