Sendmail, the Unix mail program written by Eric Allman at the University of California at Berkeley during the late 1970s, now has its own company. Last week Allman announced the formation of Sendmail Inc, based in Emeryville, California, which he will run as chief technology officer alongside Greg Olson as president and CEO. Olson is an industry veteran who worked on distributed systems at Summit Systems Inc before spells at Britton Lee Inc, Sybase Inc, and Integrated Systems Inc. Sendmail Inc will offer commercial upgrades, service and support to internet service providers and corporations running critical email applications, while still continuing its freeware development operation. Sendmail was one of the first programs to route messages between networks, and today is still the dominant email transfer software. It thrived despite the awkward ARPAnet transition between NCP to TCP protocols in the early 1980s and the adoption of the new SMTP Simple Mail Transport Protocol, all of which made the business of mail routing a complex challenge of backward and forward compatibility over a number of years. There are now over one million copies of Sendmail installed, representing over 75% of all internet mail servers. Sun Microsystems founders Bill Joy and Andy Bechtolscheim are among the investors in the company, along with Tim O’Reilly of publishers O’Reilly & Associates, and John Funk of email company InfoBeat Inc. Simultaneously with the announcement of the company, which was actually formed in November 1997, Sendmail 8.9 was launched, featuring new tools designed to limit spam, or junk email. SendMail 8.9 is still distributed in its source code form with the rights to modify and distribute. Allman said that he had devoted the fist six months of the life of Sendmail Inc to finalizing the freeware release. So how will the company make money? A commercial version is due out this summer, costing around $1,000 per server. Projections have it that the company will have reached $40m in annual sales within three years. Funding is in the region of $1.25m.
