rsync: skip mail directory

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

i want to skip the /home/user/mail directory in an rsync

but only in this level
not like /home/user/public_html/anotherscript/mail

if i have a command like this

  rsync -av --exclude mail /home/$USER root@$SERVERIP:/home2

does it exclude only the mail directory directly under /home/user?
(this is what i want)
/home/user/mail

or is it going to exclude any directories containing the word mail?

like
/home/user/mail
/home/user/sendmail
/home/user/public_html/mailstuff
etc

2

Just use --exclude $USER/mail this will still copy:

/home/user/sendmail
/home/user/public_html/mail
/home/user/public_html/mailstuff

but not

/home/user/mail