V8.14 continued this trend by further expanding the Milter interface, adding
more antispam features, and creating more configuration flexibility.
Thoughts from Eric Allman
I have to admit that I??™m surprised by how well sendmail has succeeded. It??™s not
because of a large marketing organization or a deep-pockets budget. I think there are
three reasons.
First, sendmail took the approach that it should try to accept, clean up, and deliver
even very ???crufty??? messages instead of rejecting them because they didn??™t meet some
protocol. I felt this was important because I was trying to gateway UUCP to the
ARPAnet. At the time, the ARPAnet was small, UUCP was anarchy, and Unix mail
programs generally didn??™t even understand headers. It was harder to do, but after all,
the goal was to communicate, not to be pedantic.
Second, I limited myself to the routing function??”I wouldn??™t write user agents or
delivery backends. This was a departure from the dominant thought of the time, in
which routing logic, local delivery, and often the network code were incorporated
directly into the user agents. But it did let people incorporate their new networks
quickly.
This is the Title of the Book, eMatter Edition
Copyright ?© 2007 O??™Reilly & Associates, Inc. All rights reserved.
Preface | xix
Third, the sendmail configuration file was flexible enoughto adapt to a rapidly
changing world: the 1980s saw the proliferation of new protocols, networks, and
user agents.
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