mail binary from mailutils package 1:2.99.98-1.4 doesn't expand aliases

[Tom H]

On Mon, Jan 26, 2015 at 6:28 AM, Matthew Paul Thomas <mpt at canonical.com> wrote:
> jfprevost at bluewin.ch wrote on 21/01/15 23:17:
>>
>> This bug has been filed in 2004 in the debian bugtracker, but
>> apparently closed by the maintainer as he couldn't reproduce it. I
>> confirm that on my Ubuntu 14.04 LTS 64bits, the aliases declared
>> in my home folder's .mailrc are not expanding. For example, if I
>> declared a line "alias jfp j.f.prevost at free.fr" then when using
>> the "mail jfp" comFor example, when declaring a "alias jfp
>> j.f.prevost at free.fr" statement in my .mailrc file then when
>> calling "mail -s TEST jfp" then the mail is sent with
>> jfp at localmachinename (localmachinename being my linux system's
>> local host name) which is not correct and should not be. Please
>> (re)open a bug for this case until it gets *really* fixed.
>
> Bugs are best reported by someone who is willing and able to reproduce
> them.
>
> I suggest you get a Launchpad account, <https://launchpad.net/+login>
> then report the bug yourself. You can do this starting from a
> terminal, by entering "ubuntu-bug mailutils" (without quotes).

It's a disappointing answer...

There's already a bug so filing another report isn't really useful.

It looks like this bug is [1] and it's unclear whether it's a feature
or a bug that mailutils' mail doesn't use aliases declared in
"~/.mailrc".

A workaround seems to be to use bsd-mailx's mail.

[1] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/mailutils/+bug/1222181