Interview with Eric Allman

I first heard Eric Allman speak during a LISA tutorial. Eric was explain- ing some of the intricacies of sendmail, the mail server software he had written while at UC Berkeley in the early ’80s."

I later cornered Eric during a conference reception, an action very unlike me. But I was determined to find out why Eric had included what I thought were three backdoors in send- mail, something that turned out to be incorrect. Eric also mentioned wishing he had received even a fraction of one cent for each copy of sendmail then in use. He later started a company that provided support for sendmail, a company that followed the rise and fall of the Internet boom in the late ’90s."