Sendmail

Sendmail is a Mail Transport Agent, which dates back to the early 1980s.

Importance

This computer program has thus found widespread that many other programs for Unix assume Sendmail installed and configured to be found. Here are brief calls, such as command line and intends no use as a daemon.

To work in this mode for Sendmail designed commands are referred to other mail transfer agents as compatibility with Sendmail, which is a frequently highlighted property.

License

Sendmail is free open source software. It uses its own license, which allows you to create non-commercial proprietary derivative works.

History

Sendmail was released with the first Berkeley Software Distribution for TCP / IP. Eric Allman had developed this program from its hack deliver mail, which he programmed in 1980 for the Customizing E -mail addresses between different computer networks at the University of California at Berkeley. That was deliver mail only configurable in the source code, proved in the introduction of TCP, DNS and SMTP as very cumbersome and led the development of Sendmail. On deliver mail 2 as followed Sendmail 3

To be included in the first free Unix was not the only advantage of Sendmail. With the older alternative to MMDF only had a group for implementation of TCP / IP, see, which lasted two years. In sendmail amendments made much faster.

1987 Lennart Lovstrand developed at Linköping University from the version 5 of Sendmail cleavage IDA sendmail, emerged from the turn KJS and UIUC IDA. UIUC IDA was supervised by Paul Pomes at the University of Illinois and Neil Rickert of Northern Illinois University, who developed the modern concept of configuration. Manufacturer of Unix such as Sun Microsystems developed their own advanced variants. Hewlett -Packard added, for example, support for MIME. Configuration files were not interchangeable between different versions and different versions with same problems require different solutions.

1992 Allman began with the rewrite of Sendmail version 8, which took over much of the spin-offs. In 1999 he was co-founder of the company, Sendmail, Inc., which took over the development and marketing of sendmail. The version 8.10 of 2000 was the first of the company published and been largely programmed by Greg Shapiro. Claus Assmann later added authentication and encryption, and directed the development of new.

Sendmail 9 was renamed during its development in sendmail X and eventually spun off as META1. This software by Assmann is no longer monolithic but modular.

Criticism

Configuring Sendmail is complex. Even long exotic network protocols such as UUCP are also provided with several configuration options. Fundamental changes were already being considered early, but was omitted because of the prevalence, which was initially given only supposedly.

Vulnerabilities in Sendmail were known already in the space of a few weeks. End of May 2006 Sendmail has been removed from NetBSD. Its developers were tired of being prevented from fixing security problems because most are classified as confidential and Sendmail is safety problems in itself.