62 Mail
Sendmail: The Vietnam of Berkeley Unix
Before Unix, electronic mail simply worked. The administrators at differ-
ent network sites agreed on a protocol for sending and receiving mail, and
then wrote programs that followed the protocol. Locally, they created sim-
ple and intuitive systems for managing mailing lists and mail aliases. Seri-
ously: how hard can it be to parse an address, resolve aliases, and either
send out or deliver a piece of mail?Quite hard, actually, if your operating system happens to be Unix.
Date: Wed, 15 May 1991 14:08-0400
From: Christopher Stacy
<[email protected]>
To: UNIX-HATERS
Subject: harder!faster!deeper!unixRemember when things like netmail used to work? With UNIX, peo-
ple really don’t expect things to work anymore. I mean, things sorta
work, most of the time, and that’s good enough, isn’t it? What’s
wrong with a little unreliability with mail? So what if you can’t reply
to messages? So what if they get dropped on the floor?The other day, I tried talking to a postmaster at a site running send-
mail. You see, whenever I sent mail to people at his site, the headers
of the replies I got back from his site came out mangled, and I
couldn’t reply to their replies. It looked like maybe the problem was
at his end—did he concur? This is what he sent back to me:Date: Mon, 13 May 1991 21:28 EDT
From: [email protected] (Stephen J. Silver)^1
To: mit-eddie!STONY-
[email protected]
2
Subject: Re: mangled headersNo doubt about it. Our system mailer did it. If you got it, fine.
If not, how did you know? If you got it, what is wrong? Just
does not look nice? I am not a sendmail guru and do not have(^1) Pseudonym.
(^2) Throughout most of this book, we have edited gross mail headers for clarity. But
on this message, we decided to leave this site’s sendmail’s handiwork in all its
glory—Eds.