Sendmail

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Sendmail

Sendmail is a mail transfer agent (MTA) that is a well known project of the open source and Unix communities and is distributed both as free software and proprietary software.

History and use

A descendant of the original ARPANET delivermail application, Sendmail is a remarkably flexible program, supporting many kinds of mail transfer and delivery including the overwhelmingly popular SMTP. The original version of Sendmail was written by Eric Allman in the early 1980s at UC Berkeley, who had also written delivermail previously. Delivermail was shipped in 1979 with 4.0 and 4.1 BSD. Sendmail was shipped with BSD 4.1c in 1983 (the first BSD version to include TCP/IP).

Sendmail remains the most popular MTA on the Internet, although this is probably fading. Its popularity is due in part to its position as the standard MTA under most variants of the Unix operating system. According to one study, as of November 2001 approximately 42% of the publicly reachable mail servers on the Internet were running Sendmail.

Sendmail-8.12 as of September 2001 introduced support for Milter - external mail filtering programs/servers consulted during SMTP session.

Sendmail is extremely complex, and hard to set up for most administrators. Although it is probably still one of the most flexible and scalable MTAs, its security history was abysmal for a long time, and more and more sites are migrating to qmail, Exim, Postfix or any of the many other alternatives that exist nowadays. The Robert Tappan Morris internet worm exploited a buffer overflow in sendmail.

Sendmail X

The next generation of Sendmail is called sendmail X (previously it was called sendmail 9). It is not an evolution of Sendmail version 8.

The first release of Sendmail X (smX-0.0.0.0) was made available on October 30 2005. The latest release is smX-1.0.PreAlpha7.0. and was released on May 20 2006. Sendmail X.1.0.PreAlpha7.0 has now the same license as sendmail 8.

Sendmail-8

Releases

Sendmail-8.13.7 2006-06-14
Sendmail-8.13.6 2006-03-22
Sendmail-8.13.0 2004-06-20
Sendmail-8.12.0 2001-09-08
Sendmail-8.11.0 2000-07-19
Sendmail-8.10.0 2000-03-01
Sendmail-8.9.0 1998-05-19
Sendmail-8.8.0 1996-09-26
Sendmail-8.7 1995-09-16
Sendmail-8.6 1993-10-05
...
Sendmail-8.1 1993-06-07 - 4.4BSD freeze. No semantic changes.

The information is based on RELEASE_NOTES file from sendmail distribution.

History of Vulnerabilities

Sendmail vulnerabilities in CERT advisories and alerts.

Bibliography

— This is the Sendmail "bible" containing 1232 pages about Sendmail. It is also known as "The Bat Book", because of the picture on its cover. The 1st Edition was published in November 1993.
— A companion to sendmail, 3rd Edition, this book documents the improvements in V8.13 in parallel with its release.

External links

Sendmail Consortium, sendmail.org
Sendmail, Inc., sendmail.com
Daniel J. Bernstein, Internet host SMTP server survey, November 2001
Mike Brodbelt, A brief history of mail
Sendmail X architecture overview
— presented at the USENIX Annual Technical Conference

Mail transport agents

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