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<p>Clem, normally your history is completely accurate, but this time
I need to provide a few corrections.</p>
<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 2024-08-12 10:34, Clem Cole wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:CAC20D2MTrT_Rusw_pM7CBES2Uc296=GGapXqX8oPMSFwdoNxuw@mail.gmail.com">
<div><span class="gmail_default"
style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"><font
color="#0000ff">csh et al.). Bob later ran a serial line
up the stairwells of Cory and picked up the Ingres and the
first CAD machine. Kurt Shoens, who was the primary UCB
Mail author, hacked the Berknet support into his work. One
of his primary additions was removing the "delivery" part of
the mail into a separate program - that he called
"delivermail." <br>
</font></span></div>
</blockquote>
Actually, I'm the one who separated the delivery into another
program that was indeed called "delivermail". I modified /bin/mail
to do actual delivery if it was invoked with -d, otherwise call
delivermail. I took out the hacks for networks such as UUCP and
moved them to delivermail.
<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:CAC20D2MTrT_Rusw_pM7CBES2Uc296=GGapXqX8oPMSFwdoNxuw@mail.gmail.com">
<div><br>
</div>
<div>
<div class="gmail_default"
style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"><font
color="#0000ff">Eric Alman was the system administrator of
Ing70, so Eric hacked delivermail to pass email to and from
the Berknet to the ARPANET. </font><span
style="color:rgb(0,0,255)">All was good until Ernie covax
showed up and was connected to the UUCP net ;-)</span></div>
</div>
</blockquote>
That part is correct. In fact, the ARPANET was the reason for
delivermail in the first place. The BerkNet hacks had already been
done to /bin/mail, I think by Eric Schmidt.<br>
<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:CAC20D2MTrT_Rusw_pM7CBES2Uc296=GGapXqX8oPMSFwdoNxuw@mail.gmail.com">
<div>
<div class="gmail_default"
style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"><font
color="#0000ff"><br>
</font></div>
<div class="gmail_default"
style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"><font
color="#0000ff">Eric refers to that time as "the email
format of the week" and sendmail was created to allow him to
more easily handle the different formats. By then there was
the DARPA 733/822 format (user@host), Berknet (host:user),
UUCP (host1!host2...!hostn!user) being sources at UCB, as
well as crap showing up from the IBM Educational System,
CSNET and various other places trying be exchanged.</font></div>
</div>
</blockquote>
<p>Don't forget DECnet (host::user) and things like some mercifully
dead UK network that reversed the domain names, so this mailing
list would be <a class="moz-txt-link-rfc2396E" href="mailto:tuhs@org.tuhs">"tuhs@org.tuhs"</a>. And the compiled in configuration
that delivermail used was becoming unwieldy as the world get
bigger, hence a configuration file.<br>
</p>
<p>But the real reason for sendmail was the advent of the Internet,
which used an entirely new mail protocol called SMTP. That
required implementing queuing and better error reporting than
returning an exit status. Bill Joy talked me into it because "you
know mail better than anyone around here." I didn't expect it to
turn into the cornerstone of my professional life. There are more
stories there, but they are off topic.<br>
</p>
<p>eric<br>
</p>
<br>
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