September 24, 1999 Web posted at: 10:53 a.m. EDT (1453 GMT) by Nora Mikes

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(IDG) -- Sendmail Inc. this week released a new product aimed squarely at the NT market. Version 8.9.3 of the sendmail mail transfer agent (MTA) is the core of Sendmail for NT, version 3.0. And that new product isn't even open source.

Why is a company that emerged from the open source milieu and has always stayed true to its open source roots interested in a proprietary operating system?

According to Wiley Hodges, product line manager for servers at Sendmail, the people responsible for the sendmail MTA have always been interested in having it work on as many platforms as possible -- even 18 years ago, when the sendmail program was first written. He said that it is thanks to sendmail's open source heritage that the program has the cross-platform capabilities it does today.

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Of course, there is also a profit motive. "Clearly, NT is a very significant enterprise platform," Hodges said.

Although Sendmail still releases the source code to its core technologies today, it is very much a commercial company, and it has developed its own open source business model. Sendmail sells service and support, and the Pro version of the program comes with easy-to-use GUI configuration tools. Those who download the open source version have to contend with configuring it by hand -- a task often deemed formidable even by Unix gurus.

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Since its founding in November 1997, Sendmail has always released the source code to its new products before or at the same time as their commercial releases. The company will depart from this model with its NT product because, as Hodges told LinuxWorld, it doesn't own the intellectual property rights to all of the technology in Sendmail for NT.

"Open sourcing it today is not an option," he said, adding, "We hope that this is something we can do in the future."

Sendmail on Unix versus Sendmail on NT versus Microsoft Exchange

In its press release, Sendmail says that the new product, based in part on technology which the company acquired last year from MetaInfo Inc., makes NT "more scalable, more reliable, and more secure" -- all qualities which are often cited as reasons to switch from NT to Linux or Unix.

In fact, the MTA that forms the core of Sendmail for NT is the same as the open source MTA currently used in Unix versions of the product. Overall, Hodges told LinuxWorldthat the NT and Unix versions were "very close" to being equivalent.

The application layer might be comparable in both cases, but the OSes are not. When asked if an NT box running Sendmail would be as secure as a Linux box running Sendmail, Hodges demurred. "We can't take on ... the general problem of making any OS secure," he said, adding that it is the task of the administrator to make a box "as robust and secure as possible."

But he did say that, in some cases, an NT box running Sendmail will be more secure than an NT box running Microsoft Exchange -- which he identified as probably Sendmail's largest competitor in the MTA space on NT.

Sendmail's new NT 3.0 product provides NT administrators with security features, like header scanning, relay access control, and better defenses against theoretical attacks, to which Unix and Linux system administrators are already accustomed. It also scans for viruses which, like the Melissa virus, leave a footprint in the message headers or envelope, Hodges said. Such viruses can be blocked with Sendmail -- but not with Microsoft Exchange.

"Within a couple of hours of [Melissa's] appearance," Hodges said, "we were able to apply [and post to the Internet] a Sendmail rule ... which enabled our customers to block Melissa." Sendmail doesn't scan email attachments for viral infections, he said, but the company does work closely with Trend Micro on its InterScan VirusWall scanning software.

The new NT version of Sendmail, like its Unix counterpart, includes strong spam-blocking capabilities. Sendmail can also be used in conjunction with programs like Exchange for companies that are looking for a more secure MTA, but still need Notes-like interoperability on the Microsoft platform.

Migration patterns

Sendmail is not the only open source development team which is porting software to NT. Hodges mentioned several open source projects, like Perl, the Berkeley DB, and the Apache Web server, which also port their software to NT.

He told LinuxWorld that this is a particular benefit for NT users who are worried about "the admin load associated with Linux," and that such ports "will allow people with a Unix legacy to adapt things to NT, making the platform less of an issue" in the market as a whole.

This, in Hodges's opinion, is a Good Thing. "Sendmail is the focus, not the OS," he said, adding that many IT managers welcome the NT port from Sendmail, as it "gives them choice, so they are not locked into a single vendor."

Hodges pointed out that such choice makes it much easier for IT managers to migrate to a different platform later, since applications -- Perl, OpenLDAP, Sendmail, etc. -- can stay the same even if the underlying OS changes.

"We have had customers who have migrated from NT to Unix/Linux/BSD," he said.