The ancestor of

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 ...

, delivermail, also by Eric Allman, is a

mail transport agent Within the Internet email system, a message transfer agent (MTA), or mail transfer agent, or mail relay is software that transfers electronic mail messages from one computer to another using SMTP. The terms mail server, mail exchanger, and MX host ...

that used the FTP protocol on the early

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 foun ...

to transmit

e-mail 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 ...

to the recipient.Sendmail, 3rd Edition by Bryan Costales, O'Reilly Media, Inc., 2002
/ref> Due to deficiencies in using FTP to send e-mail, a new protocol was created in 1981 for sending e-mail,

SMTP The Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) is an Internet standard communication protocol for electronic mail transmission. Mail servers and other message transfer agents use SMTP to send and receive mail messages. User-level email clients typic ...

. After

DNS The Domain Name System (DNS) is a hierarchical and distributed naming system for computers, services, and other resources in the Internet or other Internet Protocol (IP) networks. It associates various information with domain names assigned to ...

replaced hosts files, DNS-style host names were also adopted. In 1979, when ''delivermail'' was first shipped with 4.0BSD and 4.1BSD, the

was still using NCP as its

network protocol A communication protocol is a system of rules that allows two or more entities of a communications system to transmit information via any kind of variation of a physical quantity. The protocol defines the rules, syntax, semantics and synchroni ...

. When the

switched to

TCP/IP The Internet protocol suite, commonly known as TCP/IP, is a framework for organizing the set of communication protocols used in the Internet and similar computer networks according to functional criteria. The foundational protocols in the suit ...

at the end of 1982, the road was paved for MTAs which used TCP to deliver e-mail; ''delivermail'' evolved into

References

External links

delivermail 4BSD source code
1979 software Mail delivery agents Message transfer agents Unix Internet software {{Unix-stub