History of sendmail
The Past:
- sendmail is one of the oldest and most commonly used
MTAs on the Internet
- originally written before the Internet was standardized, when each
site used their own local mail system and most sites exchanged mail
using UUCP (Unix-to-Unix Copy)
- designed to be flexible enough that it could be configured to pass
mail between any two different mail systems, regardless of their
characteristics
Today:
- modern Internet is much more standardized
- the majority of the Internet uses SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol)
- much of sendmail's historical functions are no longer needed
- even using SMTP, an MTA is still needed to route mail!
Mark D. Roth <roth@feep.net>