LCA: Lessons from 30 years of Sendmail

“The Sendmail mail transfer agent tends to be one of those
programs that one either loves or hates. Both its supporters and
its detractors will agree, though, that Sendmail played a crucial
role in the development of electronic mail before, during, and
after the explosion of the Internet. Sendmail creator Eric Allman
took a trip to Brisbane to talk to the LCA 2011 about the history
of this project. Sendmail is, he said, 30 years old now; in those
three decades it has thrived without corporate support, changed the
world, and thrived in a world which was changing rapidly around
it.

“The history

“Sendmail had its start at the University of California,
Berkeley, in 1980; it was initially something Eric did while he was
supposed to be working on the Ingres relational database management
system. In those days, the Computer Science department had a dozen
machines, but the main system was “Ernie CoVAX,” which was accessed
via ASCII terminals. There was a limited number of ports, so users
had to connect via a patch panel in the mail room; contention for
available ports was often intense.”

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