Sendmail
More info
- Creator
- Eric Allman
- Released
- 1983
- Type
- Mail transfer agent
Berkeley's mail server, which delivered most of the internet's email for two decades and was infamous for its configuration file.
Eric Allman first wrote delivermail for Berkeley in 1979, then sendmail, which shipped with 4.2BSD in 1983. Its strength was routing mail between networks that didn't speak the same language: SMTP over the ARPANET, UUCP with its bang paths, and local systems. That required a rule engine for rewriting addresses, and the rule engine was driven by sendmail.cf.
The file was cryptic enough that most people generated it from m4 macros, and editing it by hand was treated as a rite of passage. The security record was no better — debug mode was one of the Morris worm's entry points. Postfix and qmail were written in the late 1990s as explicit reactions to sendmail. It is still around, owned by Proofpoint since 2013.