26 Nov
2013
26 Nov
'13
9:57 p.m.
below...
On Tue, Nov 26, 2013 at 11:49 AM, Jeremy C. Reed <reed(a)reedmedia.net> wrote:
I am reading the delivermail (later known as postbox
and then sendmail)
code from 4.0BSD and from sccs history from June 1980.
sendmail was really a different code base from delivermail. As Eric
(Allman) used to say, the later was created to solve the "header of the
week" issue he was fighting at the time.
Its arpa-mailer(8) manual says it just spools the letter and actual
delivery will be performed by the ARPANET mailer daemon and refers to
mailer(ARPA) manual. The arpa.c code says "is stuck away in the
outgoing arpanet mail queue for delivery by the true arpanet mailer."
Where is this true arpanet mailer? I am guessing it periodically looks
in /usr/spool/netmail/ and delivers the messages using FTP and RFC458.
Where is this mailer(ARPA) manual?
At one point there was an smtpd that was written by BBN. I don't remember
why Eric did not continue to use it when he wrote sendmail. At Berkeley
at the time, the only system that needed it was Ing70 later IngVax [which
of course Eric managed] because that was the Internet connection for the
systems on campus. We all ran the BerkNet to the ingress systems for
Internet mail or to ernie (later ucbvax) to do UUCP mail.
He and I talked about about it once, I had always wished he had left the
different "connector" programs alone and just let sendmail be a header
rewriting system.
Where is the ftp server code used for the incoming mail? (Example
code mail-dm.c is provided for the ftp server to "handle the MAIL <user>
command over the command connection.")
Also where is the uucp-mailer(8) manpage referenced in delivermail(8)?
uucp just handed off to /bin/mail for delivery. I thought delivermail did
the same thing. I think it was Kurt Shoens who did the splicing of Berkeley
delivermail to uucp, but again I've forgotten - a long time ago. The SCCS
headers might say. memory was that Kurt and Eric Schmidt
Clem