Hi Chris, > Perhaps the docs could be made a bit clearer on this about 'mail' using a > completely different *syntax*?
Well, I thought that the paragraph quoted by Alfred makes this quite clear. If you can think of a better way to do so, your propositions to reword it will be quite welcome. In fact, 'mail' *has* to use the traditional syntax because it is designed as a drop-in replacement for the usual unix /bin/mail (mailx) command, and that syntax (as well as the locations of its configuration files) are mandated by POSIX. It could be possible to use *both* the mailutils configs and traditional ones, but in practice it proved to be too cumbersome and error-prone. > Perhaps changing "Each line read from these files is processed like a usual > `mail' command." to "Each line read from these files is expected to be a > valid `mail' command. *Note: Mail commands"? Perhaps so. Thanks for the suggestion. > Also might like to point out that it appears that 'mail' *requires* an > initial config of some sort simply to work. No, it does not. It provides all needed defaults by itself. Moreover, in our testsuite we ensure that it is run without any configuration files. > I also tried 'mail chris@localhost', resulting in the same error. I seem to have missed something. What error was it? Sending mail in default configuration can fail if there is no /usr/sbin/sendmail on the local box or if this program does not conform to the sendmail invocation syntax (e.g. it does not understand -t option). In both cases setting the "verbose" variable might help find out the cause. Regards, Sergey _______________________________________________ Bug-mailutils mailing list [email protected] https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-mailutils
