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Tagged by Ali.

Following text is from the book “Rebel Code”. Jay Walker gave me this book to read few weeks ago but still I’m unable to find time to read it. He has also written review of this book here.

From chapter “Learning from Berkeley”:

Sending the university e-mail to the right place was no longer a simple matter, and the system employed by Delivermail couldn’t cope with the various kinds of networks that were being hooked into Berkeley. Allman decided that he needed to rewrite Delivermail so that machines could be configured without fiddling with the software itself, and to build more intelligence into the program so that it could decipher from the e-mail addresses where messages should be sent.

He called the result Sendmail. Its success was driven in part by the new flexibility it offered. “If you had a new network, you could integrate that into Sendmail more quickly than you could into the others,” Allman explains, “This was long before everyone was doing Internet, and so new networks would show up, mushrooms in the night.”