Created in the early 1980s by Eric Allman at UC Berkeley, sendmail quickly dominated email delivery despite its byzantine configuration language and legendary tendency toward gaping security holes. Administrators lovingly referred to its config files as “line noise,” while its source code was often compared unfavorably to an explosion in a noodle factory. Today, sendmail lives on, barely, kept alive by grizzled admins too scarred to learn postfix or exim.
