The e-mail enlightened person regrets his invention

Eric Allman, who laid the foundation for the popular Sendmail email transfer protocol on the Internet, said he never agreed to deploy the project if he envisioned e-mail as strong and profitable as it is now. . Back then, he wrote code without paying any money.

" Berkeley University (California, USA) intends to build an Internet platform for research and one thing they need is an SMTP mail gateway ," Allman said. "So I rushed to write code ". This work was conducted in 1981 to meet the need to access the Arpanet network - the predecessor of the Internet.

" At the time I said that e-mail was the means to connect the Arpanet to the network system available at Berkeley, called Berknet, and could transfer information using a very simple program ," Allman said. . "At first I thought it was easy, but when I started working, I was overwhelmed. Those who did the same work said the same thing ." Allman wrote the code for the first Delivermail mailing system, then upgraded to Sendmail with more complex features, helping e-mail, since the 1960s, until the mid-80s of the last century. Start getting noticed.

By the end of the 90s, Allman had just formed a company after seeing his colleagues become millionaires and famous in Silicon Valley. He worked with Eric Schmidt, Google CEO and Bill Joy, who founded Sun Microsystems.

" There are a lot of talented people in Berkeley and they are famous now, " Allman commented. " As for me, at that time I did not establish a company with Sendmail because the form of e-mail transfer was not popular and very few people were willing to pay for this service ."

The Allman system for sending and receiving e-mails is now used all over the world and will still be a means of communication between computers in the future. Sendmail is a famous work in the open source and Unix operating systems because it supports many mailing protocols such as SMTP, ESMTP, DECnet's mail11, HylaFax, QuickPage. In addition, Sendmail also supports Windows operating system, POP3 protocol. Microsoft, though unrelated to open source, has also applied this technique in its internal mail system.