History and use
The descendent of the original ARPANET delivermail application, Sendmail is a remarkably flexible program, supporting numerous kinda mail transport & delivery including a overpoweringly popular SMTP. A original version of Sendmail was written by Eric Allman in the early 1980s at UC Berkeley, who experienced likewise written delivermail previously. Delivermail was shipped in 1979 by having Four.0 & Four.Ace BSD. Sendmail was shipped sustaining BSD 4.1c in 1983 (a number 1 BSD version to include TCP/IP).

Sendmail hwhen been widely criticized as slow, overcomplicated, unsafe, & hard to maintain in comparison by using more MTAs like Exim, Postfix and Qmail. Nonetheless it remains a virtually all popular MTA using your internet browser (albeit non when popular when it it used to be that wwhen), a fact virtually all surely due around a portion to its position as the standard MTA under most variants of the Unix operating system. Based on data from of these learn, as of November 2001 approximately 42% of the publicly reachable mail servers using your internet browser were running off Sendmail.

Sendmail is typically rerun when a superuser, representing a severe security threat in case compromised. This is despite a recommendation since 2001 by its authors that it exist as start as an unprivileged user. Sendmail version Octad.Twelve (& late) is no hanker installed by default when setuid root.

Sendmail-8.Xii as of September 2001 introduced support for Milter - external mail filtering programs/servers consulted during SMTP session.

Within 2003 three serious vulnerabilities were found & fixed around Sendmail version Eighter. 2 of the two were message-oriented & can be exploited possibly in servers by using there are no straight access from either Internet.

Around 1988 the Morris worm used vulnerabilities in Sendmail & more computer program to spread itself.

Sendmail X
A next generation of Sendmail (under development) is known as [http://www.sendmail.org/~ca/email/sm-9-rfh.html sendmail X] (antecedently it was known as sendmail Niner). These are non an evolution of Sendmail version Octad. Although these are purported to become the "complete new design", its project is as a matter of fact jolly great deal an precise copy of the project of Postfix (master becomes MCP, smtpd becomes SMTPS, local becomes LDA, smtp becomes SMTPC, trivial-rewrite becomes AR, and qmgr becomes QMGR). Occasionally develop speculated that this, within conjunction sustaining a fact that Postfix exists and is around production apply whereas Sendmail X is however existence developed, has simply accelerated a decline of Sendmail.

Sendmail X is available for [http://www.sendmail.org/sm-X/release.html beta testing]. A latest public beta release of Sendmail X ([http://www.sendmail.org/sm-X/release.html smX-0.0.Beta3.0]) was was manufactured available at October 22005.

Sendmail-8

Releases
[http://www.sendmail.org/8.13.4.html Sendmail-8.13.4] 2005-03-27 [http://www.sendmail.org/8.13.0.html Sendmail-8.13.0] 2004-06-20 [http://www.sendmail.org/8.12.0.html Sendmail-8.12.0] 2001-09-08 [http://www.sendmail.org/8.11.0.html Sendmail-8.11.0] 2000-07-19 Sendmail-8.X.0 2000-03-01 Sendmail-8.Nine.0 1998-05-19 Sendmail-8.Eight.0 1996-09-26 Sendmail-8.7 1995-09-16 Sendmail-8.6 1993-10-05 ... Sendmail-8.One 1993-06-07 - 4.4BSD freeze. There is no semantic changes.

The information is according to [http://www.sendmail.org/ftp/RELEASE_NOTES RELEASE_NOTES file] from either sendmail distribution.

Vulnerabilities
* * * {{Web reference|title=CA-1997-05 MIME Conversion Buffer Overflow inside Sendmail Versions 8.Octet.Three & 8.Octonary.4|work=CERT Advisories|URL=http://www.cert.org/advisories/CA-1997-05.html * *