Re: [bug-mailutils] Configuration issue

[Chris Hall]

Thanks for the fast response!

Sorry if I sounded impolite, I didn't mean to, nor to be unkind.  But after several hours feeling like I was stupid, had missed something obvious, and trying every single thing I could think of including uninstalling 2.99.96, re-configuring and building the *stable* version, reading *those* docs, poring over the config log, the make output and the testsuite.log of two different versions, then trying everything I had tried before *again* . . . well, sorry.

So I did follow the directions in docs, and also have /usr/local/etc/mailutils.rc with the 

mailer {

  url smtp://localhost;

}

and ran 'mail with --config-verbose --config verbose chris' and saw that it was being parsed.

Perhaps the docs could be made a bit clearer on this about 'mail' using a completely different *syntax*?  Having re-read them, they *do* mention 'commands'.

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"?

Too, while the description of the 'sendmail' variable does mention it contains the URL of the MTA, the default, which appears above the description, shows what looks very like the variable name being discussed, colon, example file system path to a program.  Yes, in the 'mailutils' scheme it is a URL, but to a 'mailutils' n00b such as myself?

Also might like to point out that it appears that 'mail' *requires* an initial config of some sort simply to work.  I also tried 'mail address@hidden',  resulting in the same error.

I'll assume 'mail' is the only exception in the wonderful suite of tools (Guile, YAY!) that obviously have many, many hours of what appears to be quite good work in them, but please do let me know if it isn't.

Thanks again,

Chris Hall

On Mon, May 28, 2012 at 6:22 AM, Alfred M. Szmidt <address@hidden> wrote:

From the manual, `mail -- Send and Receive Mail':

 In contrast to other GNU Mailutils programs, `mail' does not use the
 Mailutils configuration file.  Instead, it uses the traditional
 `mailrc'-style configuration.

What you want is something like,

 set sendmail=smtp://localhost:25

  I spend too much time on this, please help, I have only limited
  time, would rather be productive rather than spend hours trying to
  configure something so simple as 'mailer URL', but *must* find some
  mail tools that work.  If not this one, I start over looking at
  others.

Please try to be a bit more polite, we also have limited time and have
more productive things to do than help people who are unkind toward
us.