Sendmail

This article is about the mail transfer agent. For the company, see Sendmail, Inc.

Sendmail

Original author(s)	Eric Allman
Developer(s)	Sendmail Consortium, Proofpoint, Inc.
Initial release	1983 (1983)
Stable release	8.18.1 / January 31, 2024 (2024-01-31)
Operating system	Cross-platform
Type	Mail transfer agent
License	Sendmail License
Website	www.proofpoint.com/us/products/open-source-email-solution

Sendmail is a general purpose internetwork email routing facility that supports many kinds of mail-transfer and delivery methods, including the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) used for email transport over the Internet.

A descendant of the delivermail program written by Eric Allman, Sendmail is a well-known project of the free and open source software and Unix communities. It has spread both as free software and proprietary software.

Overview

Allman wrote the original ARPANET delivermail which shipped in 1979 with 4.0 and 4.1 BSD. He wrote Sendmail as a derivative of delivermail in the early 1980s at UC Berkeley. It shipped with BSD 4.1c in 1983, the first BSD version that included TCP/IP protocols.

In 1996, approximately 80% of the publicly reachable mail-servers on the Internet ran Sendmail. More recent surveys have suggested a decline, with 3.64% of mail servers in March 2021 detected as running Sendmail in a study performed by E-Soft, Inc. A previous survey (December 2007 or earlier) reported 24% of mail servers running Sendmail according to a study performed by Mail Radar.

Allman designed Sendmail to incorporate great flexibility, but it can be daunting to configure for novices. Standard configuration packages delivered with the source code distribution require the use of the M4 macro language which hides much of the configuration complexity. The configuration defines the site-local mail delivery options and their access parameters, the mechanism of forwarding mail to remote sites, as well as many application tuning parameters.

Sendmail supports a variety of mail transfer protocols, including SMTP, DECnet's Mail-11, HylaFAX, QuickPage and UUCP. Additionally, Sendmail v8.12 as of September 2001 introduced support for milters - external mail filtering programs that can participate in each step of the SMTP conversation.

Acquisition by Proofpoint, Inc.

Sendmail, Inc was acquired by Proofpoint, Inc. This announcement was released on 1 October 2013.

Security

Sendmail originated in the early days of the Internet, an era when considerations of security did not play a primary role in the development of network software. Early versions of Sendmail suffered from a number of security vulnerabilities that have been corrected over the years.

Sendmail itself incorporated a certain amount of privilege separation in order to avoid exposure to security issues. As of 2009, current versions of Sendmail, like other modern MTAs, incorporate a number of security improvements and optional features that can be configured to improve security and help prevent abuse.

History of vulnerabilities

Sendmail vulnerabilities in CERT advisories and alerts:

• "TA06-081A Sendmail Race Condition Vulnerability". US-CERT Alerts. Archived from the original on 2006-04-08.
• "CA-2003-25 Buffer Overflow in Sendmail". CERT Advisories. 31 December 2003. Archived from the original on 2021-10-24. Retrieved January 7, 2005.
• "CA-2003-12 Buffer Overflow in Sendmail". CERT Advisories. 31 December 2003. Archived from the original on 2021-10-24. Retrieved January 7, 2005.
• "CA-2003-07 Remote Buffer Overflow in Sendmail". CERT Advisories. 31 December 2003. Archived from the original on 2021-10-24. Retrieved January 7, 2005.
• "CA-1997-05 MIME Conversion Buffer Overflow in Sendmail Versions 8.8.3 and 8.8.4". CERT Advisories. 31 December 1997. Archived from the original on 2021-10-24. Retrieved January 7, 2005.
• "CA-1996-25 Sendmail Group Permissions Vulnerability". CERT Advisories. 31 December 1996. Archived from the original on 2021-10-24. Retrieved January 7, 2005.
• "CA-1996-24 Sendmail Daemon Mode Vulnerability". CERT Advisories. 31 December 1996. Archived from the original on 2021-10-24. Retrieved January 7, 2005.
• "CA-1996-20 Sendmail Vulnerabilities". CERT Advisories. 31 December 1996. Archived from the original on 2021-10-24. Retrieved January 7, 2005.

The UNIX-HATERS Handbook dedicated an entire chapter to perceived problems and weaknesses of sendmail.

Implementation

As of sendmail release 8.12.0 the default implementation of sendmail runs as the Unix user smmsp — the sendmail message submission program.

See also

• List of mail servers
• Comparison of mail servers
• Mail delivery agent
• Mail user agent
• msmtp
• Internet messaging platform
• Morris worm
• MeTA1

References

• Bryan Costales with Eric Allman (October 2007). sendmail, 4th Edition. O'Reilly and Associates. — This is the Sendmail "bible" containing 1308 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.
• Bryan Costales; George Jansen; Claus Assmann; Gregory Shapiro (September 2004). sendmail 8.13 Companion. O'Reilly and Associates. — A companion to sendmail, 3rd Edition, this book documents the improvements in V8.13 in parallel with its release.
• Craig Hunt (December 2003). sendmail Cookbook. O'Reilly.
• Nick Christenson (2002-09-13). sendmail Performance Tuning. Addison-Wesley. ISBN 978-0-321-11570-6.
• Paul Vixie; Frederick M Avolio (2002-01-09). sendmail Theory and Practice. Digital Press. ISBN 978-1555582296.
• Lourier, Philippe (1999). "History of Sendmail: Interview with Eric Allman". Dr. Dobb's Journal.
• Eric Allman; et al. (1999). Sendmail Evolution: 8.10 and Beyond (PDF). USENIX Annual Technical Conference. Archived (PDF) from the original on 2000-09-14.

External links

• Sendmail, Inc.
• Sendmail sources
• SMTPfeed, SMTP Fast Exploding External Deliverer for Sendmail.
• Daniel J. Bernstein, Internet SMTP server survey, October 2001
• Mike Brodbelt, A brief history of mail