SENDMAIL LIMITED

About SENDMAIL LIMITED

Sendmail, Inc. was established to commercialize the widely adopted open-source Sendmail Mail Transfer Agent (MTA).

The company's origins are deeply rooted in the history of the internet itself. Eric Allman, a computer programmer, developed the foundational sendmail software at the University of California, Berkeley in the early 1980s. As a student and staff member, Allman created sendmail's precursor, delivermail, to solve the challenge of routing email between three disparate networks on campus: ARPAnet, UUCP, and BerkNet. The subsequent creation of sendmail was a significant development that supported the internet's transition to the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP). For years, Allman continued developing sendmail, which became a core component of the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) and, by the mid-1990s, was running on approximately 80% of the internet's mail servers.

To provide professional resources, support, and further development for the ubiquitous open-source project, Allman co-founded Sendmail, Inc. in 1998 with Greg Olson. The firm operated on a hybrid model, continuing to fuel the open-source version while developing commercial products for enterprise clients. The business provided solutions to simplify email infrastructure complexity and reduce IT costs for large organizations. Its main product was the Sentrion Email Infrastructure Platform, designed for the full inspection of message content and policy-based delivery for both human and machine-generated email. The business model focused on providing commercial versions of the software and value-add products, targeting telecommunications providers, ISPs, and enterprise system administrators.

On October 1, 2013, the security-as-a-service provider Proofpoint, Inc. acquired Sendmail, Inc. for approximately $23 million in cash. The acquisition gave Proofpoint ownership of a core messaging technology its own enterprise protection solutions were built upon, and it brought Sendmail's technical talent in-house. Proofpoint has continued to maintain and support the open-source sendmail distribution, which is still available for download.