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COOL ALUMNI: ERIC ALLMAN
The Man Who Made E-mail Go
By Patti Meagher
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Eric Allman (B.S.’77 EECS, M.S.’80 CS) was a student at Berkeley Engineering when he developed sendmail, the invisible program that moves your e-mail to someone else’s inbox when you hit “send.” The product, still marketed and supported by Allman’s Emeryville-based Sendmail, Inc., is now responsible for delivering 70 percent of e-mail traffic worldwide.
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It was 1980. Personal computers hadn’t been invented yet, and Soda Hall hadn’t been built. The Internet was barely 10 years old and still in its nascent form known as Arpanet, the networking system developed by the U.S. Department of Defense. Access to this powerful tool was exclusive in those days, limited to academic researchers working on defense projects.
Eric Allman (B.S.’77 EECS, M.S.’80 CS) was pursuing his master’s degree and working on Berkeley’s INGRES project, one of the world’s first and most influential relational database management systems. On their Cory Hall computer, INGRES staff like Allman had access to the powerful Arpanet network, a rare luxury coveted by the computer scientists in Evans Hall.
“There were sometimes fights,” Allman says. “A lot of faculty and graduate students wanted accounts on our machine, but that was impossible.” He was the only one in his group who knew anything about e-mail.
“At one point I figured, OK, I can write some software that glues this one software to this other software, forwards mail from Arpanet to their primary machine so they don’t have to switch to this machine, and then forwards it back out again. It was a quick hack, but it worked.”
From that simple problem-solving exercise evolved one of the first implementations of SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol), the Internet protocol used to deliver mail. Allman perfected his quick hack, working on his own time and distributing the program to Berkeley’s Computer Systems Research Group (CSRG), which had a contract with the Department of Defense for developing an operating system that would facilitate collaboration among researchers.
The product, better known as sendmail, celebrated its 25th anniversary last fall. Sendmail became an important element of the Berkeley Software Distribution—the open-source operating system developed by the CSRG in the early 1970s—and now delivers more than 70 percent of the world’s e-mail. But if he had known then what he knows now about spam, Allman says, he might never have tackled e-mail.
“It bugs me that people are using this system without realizing that they could destroy it,” he explains. “I’d like to think better of the human race.” The spam filters that are indispensable today could not have been built into early versions, Allman says, because the emphasis back then was on sharing, not security.
Now chief science officer of Sendmail, Inc., Allman focuses on developing authentication and encryption tools like DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail) and milter (mail filter) to better protect our electronic mail from interlopers. Sendmail’s primary commercial product, Mailstream Manager, provides security and a host of other mail management functions to a majority of Fortune 1000 companies in 33 countries. Allman founded the Emeryville company in 1998, after e-mail became wildly popular and too “mission critical” for him to handle alone; until then, he had been distributing and supporting the software for free.
What Allman likes best about e-mail, he says, is its archival value, but he thinks both ordinary people and experts overuse it. When a decision needs to be made, for example, and e-mails go back and forth for days, he explains, “I want to say, ‘Guys, get up and walk into that person’s office and deal with it!’”
Allman, an El Cerrito native, was 14 years old when he first got his hands on a computer, an IBM 1401, and one of the first things he did was to recode the operating system. A self-described “social outcast” who was gay but still in the closet, Allman says computers allowed him to escape from the world.
“When I came to Berkeley in 1973, it was a truly exceptional time,” he remembers. “I learned from Ken Thompson [B.S.’65, M.S.’66 EECS], one of the original authors of UNIX, who took a sabbatical from Bell Labs.” He also rubbed shoulders with some of the most famous names in the business, including fellow alums Bill Joy (M.S.’79 EECS) and Eric Schmidt (M.S.’79, Ph.D.’82 EECS) and retired Berkeley professor Robert Fabry. While Allman’s name may not be as famous as these, he prefers it that way.
“It requires a different ego to write this kind of software,” he says. “A lot of people want to code video games; they want you to know it’s their software. But with a mail transfer agent, you want it to be invisible. The only time people even know it exists is when it’s broken. And you never want it to be broken.”
www.sendmail.com/webprograms/25 for news coverage of sendmail’s 25th anniversary.
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