<
messaging> The
BSD Unix
Message Transfer Agent supporting
mail transport via
TCP/IP using
SMTP.
Sendmail is
normally invoked in the
background via a
Mail User Agent
such as the
mail command.
Sendmail was written by
Eric Allman at the {University of
California at Berkeley} during the late 1970s. He now has his
own company,
Sendmail Inc.
Sendmail was one of the first programs to route messages
between
networks and today is still the dominant e-mail
transfer software. It thrived despite the awkward
ARPAnet
transition between
NCP to TCP protocols in the early 1980s
and the adoption of the new SMTP Simple Mail Transport
Protocol, all of which made the business of mail routing a
complex challenge of backward and forward compatibility for
several years. There are now over one million copies of
Sendmail installed, representing over 75% of all Internet mail
servers.
Simultaneously with the announcement of the company in
November 1997,
Sendmail 8.9 was launched, featuring new tools
designed to limit
junk e-mail.
SendMail 8.9 is still
distributed as
source code with the rights to modify and
distribute.
Latest version: 8.9.1, as of 1998-08-25.
The command
sendmail -bv ADDRESS
can be used to learn what the local mail system thinks of
ADDRESS. You can also talk to the
Sendmail daemon on a
remote host FOO with the command
telnet FOO 25
(1998-08-25)