Eric Allman (born 1959) is a computer programmer who developed sendmail and its precursor delivermail in the late 1970s and early 1980s at UC Berkeley.

Education and training

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Born in El Cerrito, California, Allman knew from an early age that he wanted to deal with computing later in life, breaking into his high school's mainframe and later using the UC Berkeley computing center for his computing needs. In 1973, he entered UC Berkeley, just as the Unix operating system began to become popular in academic circles.

Sendmail and other contributions

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As the Unix source code was available at Berkeley, the local hackers quickly made many extensions to the AT&T code. One such extension was delivermail, which in 1981 turned into sendmail. As an MTA, it was designed to deliver e-mail over the still relatively small (as compared to today's Internet) ARPANET, which consisted of many smaller networks with vastly differing formats for e-mail headers.

Sendmail soon became an important part of BSD, the Berkeley Software Distribution and continues to be the most widely used MTA on Unix and Linux systems today, despite its somewhat complex configuration syntax and frequent abuse by Internet telemarketing firms. In 1998, Allman founded Sendmail, Inc., headquartered in Emeryville, California, to do proprietary work on improving sendmail.

Allman is credited with popularizing the Allman indent style, also known as BSD indent style.

Private life

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Openly gay, Allman lives in Berkeley, California with his partner of over 20 years, Marshall Kirk McKusick, a lead developer of BSD, who he met in graduate school.

"There is some sort of perverse pleasure in knowing that it's basically impossible to send a piece of hate mail through the Internet without its being touched by a gay program. That's kind of funny." —Eric Allman

External links

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• HomePage for Eric Allman
• You've got Sendmail, Salon article about sendmail going commercial (December 1998)

1959 births | Living people | Computer programmers | Unix people | Lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender people

Eric Allman | Eric Allman | Eric Allman