ugh.book

Sendmail: The Vietnam of Berkeley Unix 63

one. Mail sorta works, most of the time, and given the time I

have, that is great. Good Luck.

Stephen Silver

Writing a mail system that reliably follows protocol is just not all that

hard. I don’t understand why, in 20 years, nobody in the Unix world

has been able to get it right once.

A Harrowing History

Date: Tue, 12 Oct 93 10:31:48 -0400

From: [email protected]

To: UNIX-HATERS

Subject: sendmail made simple

I was at a talk that had something to do with Unix. Fortunately, I’ve

succeeded in repressing all but the speaker’s opening remark:

I’m rather surprised that the author of sendmail is still walking

around alive.

The thing that gets me is that one of the arguments that landed Robert

Morris, author of “the Internet Worm” in jail was all the sysadmins’

time his prank cost. Yet the author of sendmail is still walking around

free without even a U (for Unixery) branded on his forehead.

Sendmail is the standard Unix mailer, and it is likely to remain the stan-
dard Unix mailer for many, many years. Although other mailers (such as
MMDF and smail) have been written, none of them simultaneously enjoy
sendmail’s popularity or widespread animosity.

Sendmail was written by Eric Allman at the University of Berkeley in
1983 and was included in the Berkeley 4.2 Unix distribution as BSD’s
“internetwork mail router.” The program was developed as a single
“crossbar” for interconnecting disparate mail networks. In its first
incarnation, sendmail interconnected UUCP, BerkNet and ARPANET (the
precursor to Internet) networks. Despite its problems, sendmail was better
than the Unix mail program that it replaced: delivermail.

In his January 1983 USENIX paper, Allman defined eight goals for send-
mail:

1. Sendmail had to be compatible with existing mail programs.