mailing diary

[John]

For many years I have used diary-mail-entries daily to send my diary
to people who need to know.  About a week ago I had to replace the
machine on which this was done and now I cannot get it to work.

I tried a simpler version of my send-calendar.el based on the script
in the documentation of diary-mail-entries but I cannot get it to work

I get

Preparing diary...
Preparing diary...done
Parsing /home/jpff/.mailrc...
Parsing /home/jpff/.mailrc... done
Sending...
Sending via mail...
Send mail via (default mail client): 

and then it stops.  I use exim as the mailer happily on the same
computer and that works.  I have tried various answers to the apparent
question but I am lost.  it used to "just work".

Sorry for my ignorance but what do I need?

==John ffitch