Eric Paul Allman (born September 2, 1955) is an American computer programmer who developed

sendmail 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 ...

and its precursor

delivermail The ancestor of sendmail, delivermail, also by Eric Allman, is a mail transport agent that used the FTP protocol on the early ARPANET to transmit e-mail to the recipient. Due to deficiencies in using FTP to send e-mail, a new protocol was created ...

in the late 1970s and early 1980s at

UC Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant uni ...

. In 1998, Allman and Greg Olson co-founded the company Sendmail, Inc.

Education and training

Born in

El Cerrito, California El Cerrito ( Spanish for "The Little Hill") is a city in Contra Costa County, California, United States, and forms part of the San Francisco Bay Area. It has a population of 25,962 according to the 2020 census. El Cerrito was founded by refugee ...

, Allman knew from an early age that he wanted to work in computing, breaking into his high school's

mainframe A mainframe computer, informally called a mainframe or big iron, is a computer used primarily by large organizations for critical applications like bulk data processing for tasks such as censuses, industry and consumer statistics, enterprise ...

and later using the UC Berkeley computing center for his computing needs. In 1973, he entered UC Berkeley, just as the

Unix Unix (; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multiuser computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, ...

operating system began to become popular in academic circles. He earned B.S. and M.S. degrees from UC Berkeley in 1977 and 1980 respectively.

Sendmail and Syslog

As the Unix source code was available at Berkeley, the local hackers quickly made many extensions to the

AT&T AT&T Inc. is an American multinational telecommunications holding company headquartered at Whitacre Tower in Downtown Dallas, Texas. It is the world's largest telecommunications company by revenue and the third largest provider of mobile ...

code. One such extension was ''

'', which in 1981 turned into ''

''. As an MTA, it was designed to deliver

email Electronic mail (email or e-mail) is a method of exchanging messages ("mail") between people using electronic devices. Email was thus conceived as the electronic ( digital) version of, or counterpart to, mail, at a time when "mail" mean ...

over the still relatively small (as compared to today's Internet)

ARPANET The Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) was the first wide-area packet-switched network with distributed control and one of the first networks to implement the TCP/IP protocol suite. Both technologies became the technical fou ...

, which consisted of many smaller networks with vastly differing formats for e-mail headers. Sendmail soon became an important part of the

Berkeley Software Distribution The Berkeley Software Distribution or Berkeley Standard Distribution (BSD) is a discontinued operating system based on Research Unix, developed and distributed by the Computer Systems Research Group (CSRG) at the University of California, Be ...

(BSD) and it used to be the most widely used MTA on Unix based systems, despite its somewhat complex configuration syntax and frequent abuse by Internet telemarketing firms. In 1998, Allman and Greg Olson founded ''Sendmail, Inc.'', headquartered in

Emeryville, California Emeryville is a city located in northwest Alameda County, California, in the United States. It lies in a corridor between the cities of Berkeley and Oakland, with a border on the shore of San Francisco Bay. The resident population was 12,905 ...

, to do

proprietary {{Short pages monitor