Sendmail Matures
P. Hayes - January 1, 2000

Vendor Genesis

In 1981, Eric Allman developed sendmail to route messages between disparate mail systems. Two years later, in 1983, sendmail version 4.2 was shipping with 18 different vendor UNIX systems. The product was primarily 'open-source' coding, which allowed system administrators to add whatever custom configurations deemed necessary. This 'open-source' code allowed sendmail to gain a strong following, which has continued to the present day. In 1991, Eric Allman unified the sendmail development volunteers and released the enhanced version of sendmail via FTP in 1992. Six years later, in March of 1998, Eric Allman and Greg Olson formally launched Sendmail, Inc. The company is privately held. The company was successfully launched with $18M (USD) is venture capital funding. By the end of the 1999 fiscal year, Sendmail, Inc. had acquired 1600 new commercial clients, resulting in both strong product and services sales. In 1999 Sendmail, Inc derived 62% of its income from product sales, and 38% from services. From a channel perspective, 68% of Sendmail, Inc.'s sales were direct, the remaining 32% was derived through channel sales. Some of Sendmail, Inc.'s clients include AMD, Pfizer, Mail.com, Lucent, Nortel, GTE, Charles Schwab and many others...