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/