sendmail

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 ofCalifornia 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)