Sendmail---An Internetwork Mail Router

Abstract

Routing mail through a heterogenous internet presents many new problems. Among the worst of these is that of address mapping. Historically, this has been handled on an ad hoc basis. However, this approach has become unmanageable as internets grow. Sendmail acts a unified "post office " to which all mail can be submitted. Address interpretation is controlled by a production system, which can parse both domain-based addressing and old-style ad hoc addresses. The production system is powerful enough to rewrite addresses in the message header to conform to the standards of a number of common target networks, including old (NCP/RFC733) Arpanet, new (TCP/RFC822) Arpanet, UUCP, and Phonenet. Sendmail also implements an SMTP server, message queueing, and aliasing. Sendmail implements a general internetwork mail routing facility, featuring aliasing and forwarding, automatic routing to network gateways, and flexible configuration. In a simple network, each node has an address, and resources can be identified with a host-resource pair; in particular, the mail system can refer to users using a host-username pair. Host names and number