Our Expertise

Staff at Bazaar Systems have been installing and supporting Sendmail since the early 90's. If you have any issues or problems with Sendmail, we can help.

History

Sendmail is probably one of the oldest pieces of Open Source software available today. In the years since it was first written by Eric Allman in 1981 while at the University of California at Berkeley, it has passed through many versions, each upgrade mirroring the next step in the progress of Internet Email. This software literally created the market. Today Sendmail can be found on 40% of all the servers on the Internet and it is responsible for delivery of 70% of all email sent worldwide. There is a nice piece on Eric Allman's contribution to the world of IT here in Wikipedia.org. By the late 90's Sendmail was the embedded mail engine on almost every Unix system on the Planet. Two issues were preventing it becoming universally adopted:

1. It was difficult to find people who knew exactly what they were doing with the product. Large companies would generally have someone in their Unix support team who know the product well, smaller companies would stick strictly to their manufacturer's pre-configured configurations or buy in the expertise..
2. Nobody had ported the product onto the Windows platform. (This was because it was Open Source software: so although anyone could do it; nobody could charge for it!)

Eric Allman himself provided the solution in 1998 by setting up the Sendmail.com organisation. Its brief was to take the Open Source product, port it to other platforms, and sell it as a fully supported commercial platform. Some of the money made from this enterprise goes to providing staff skills and resources to support the Open Source version - the two code versions are kept in step. Sendmail.com, of course offers a whole range of additional products that work with Sendmail.

There is a nice article here from salon.com about the history and decision to go commercial.

Choices

So today there are two choices for Sendmail: the Open Source product is available for free, but needs installation and support from someone who knows what they are doing, on the other hand the commercial product is available with simple installation instructions and full support - but it's not free.

Sendmail.org can be found at: www.sendmail.org

Sendmail.com can be found at www.sendmail.com

Using Sendmail

There are hundreds of ways that sendmail can be used to help the flow of Email around an Organisation. We have put together a few typical uses here.