Editing Eric Allman (section)

==Sendmail and Syslog==
As the Unix source code was available at Berkeley, the local [[Hacker culture|hackers]] quickly made many extensions to the [[AT&T]] code. One such extension was ''[[delivermail]]'', which in 1981 turned into ''[[sendmail]]''.  As an [[Mail transfer agent|MTA]], it was designed to deliver [[email]] over the still relatively small (as compared to today's Internet) [[ARPANET]], which consisted of many smaller networks with vastly differing formats for e-mail headers.

Sendmail soon became an important part of  the [[Berkeley Software Distribution]] (BSD) and it used to be the most widely used [[Message transfer agent|MTA]] on Unix based systems, despite its somewhat complex configuration syntax and frequent abuse by Internet telemarketing firms. In 1998, Allman and Greg Olson founded ''Sendmail, Inc.'', headquartered in [[Emeryville, California]], to do [[Proprietary software|proprietary]] work on improving ''sendmail''.

The logging format used by the MTA, known as [[syslog]], was at first used solely by sendmail, but eventually became an unofficial standard format used by other unrelated programs for logging. Later, this format was made official by {{IETF RFC|3164}} in 2001; however, the original format has been made obsolete by the most recent revision, {{IETF RFC|5424}}.