Ignoring symbolic links

[Harry Putnam]

man rysnc says point blank that without the -l flag symbolic links
will be ignored.

      -l, --links
              This  tells rsync to recreate symbolic links on the
              remote system  to  be the same as the local system.
              Without   this   option,  all  symbolic  links  are
              skipped.

However with the command below I continue to see symbolic links copied
from source to destination

rsync -avz --stats --exclude-from=$RSYNC_RC/.rsync-Mail_exclude \
 $SOURCE/ $SOURCE2/  $DESTINATION/