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Annotation of 42BSD/usr.lib/sendmail/doc/abstract, revision 1.1.1.1

1.1       root        1: Here it is, on the fly.....
                      2: 
                      3:        SENDMAIL -- An Internetwork Mail Router
                      4: 
                      5: Routing mail through a heterogenous internet presents many new
                      6: problems.  Among the worst of these is that of address mapping.
                      7: Historically, this has been handled on an ad hoc basis.  However,
                      8: this approach has become unmanageable as internets grow.
                      9: 
                     10: Sendmail acts a unified "post office" to which all mail can be
                     11: submitted.  Address interpretation is controlled by a production
                     12: system, which can parse both domain-based addressing and old-style
                     13: ad hoc addresses.  Mail is then dispatched to an outgoing mailer.
                     14: This system can expand trivially.  The production system is powerful
                     15: enough to rewrite addresses in the message header to conform to the
                     16: standards of a number of common target networks, including old
                     17: (NCP/RFC733) Arpanet, new (TCP/RFC822) Arpanet, UUCP, and Phonenet.
                     18: Sendmail is not intended to perform user interface functions or
                     19: final delivery.  Sendmail also implements an SMTP server, message
                     20: queueing, and aliasing.
                     21: 
                     22: This is approach is unique in that it allows external compatibility
                     23: with the old practices, and tries to make the mail system conform to
                     24: the user instead of the other way around.  Although sendmail is not
                     25: intended to circumvent new standards, it is intended to make the
                     26: transition less painful.  Sendmail does require certain base-level
                     27: standards on target mailers such as the basic semantics of certain
                     28: headers and the surface syntax of messages.  New mailers can be added
                     29: trivially; for example, a Purduenet channel was brought up in twenty
                     30: minutes.

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