14 Aug
2024
14 Aug
'24
12:13 a.m.
Clem Cole <clemc(a)ccc.com> wrote:
Eric refers to that time as "the email format of
the week" and sendmail was
created to allow him to more easily handle the different formats. By then
there was the DARPA 733/822 format (user@host), Berknet (host:user), UUCP
(host1!host2...!hostn!user) being sources at UCB, as well as crap showing
up from the IBM Educational System, CSNET and various other places trying
be exchanged.
Small correction. CSNet didn't happen until the mid-80s, by which time
sendmail was firmly entrenched in the BSD world. Circa 1987/1988, I was
the Unix sysadmin at Emory U., and we got a CSNet connection via Georgia
Tech. It required a leased X.25 (!) line and a special board to put
in one of our Vaxen. There was a driver for it for 4.2BSD but we were
running 4.3. Ron Hutchins at GT and I ported it over to 4.3BSD.
Around that time I did some work with Ease, which was a prettier
language for writing sendmail config files; the sources, including
my mods to it, are in comp.sources.unix somewhere. I wrote a sendmail
config file *from scratch* using it. As a result, the Morris worm
passed us by. :-)
Arnold
P.S. I have *literally* forgotten more about sendmail than most
people ever know. :-)