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Back in 1995, the central computing services at Cambridge University were running
a variety of mail transfer agents, including Sendmail, Smail 3, and PP. Some
years before, I had converted the systems whose mail I managed from Sendmail to
Smail to make it easier to handle the special requir ements of the early 1990s in UK
academic networking during the transition from a private X.25-based network to
the Internet. By 1995, the transition was complete, and it was time to move on.
Up to that time, the Internet had been a pretty friendly place, and there was little
need to take many precautions against hostile acts. Most sites ran open mail relays,
for example. It was clear, however, that this situation was changing and that new
requir ements wer e arising. I had done some modifications to the code of Smail,
but by then it was eight-year-old code, written in prestandard C, and originally
designed for use in a very differ ent envir onment that involved a lot of support for
UUCP. I ther efor e decided to see if I could build a new MTA from scratch, taking
the basic philosophy of Smail and extending it, but leaving out the UUCP support,
which was not needed in our environment. Because I wasn’t exactly sure what the
outcome would be, I called it EXperimental Internet Mailer (Exim).
One of my colleagues in Computer Science got wind of what I was doing, begged
for an evaluation copy, and promptly put it into service, even before I was running
it on my hosts. He started telling others about it, so I began putting releases
on an FTP site and answering email about it. The early releases were never
‘‘announced’’; they just spread by word of mouth. After some time, a UK ISP volunteer
ed to run a web site and mailing list, and it has continued to grow from
ther e. Ther e has been a continuous stream of comments and suggestions, and
ther e ar e far more facilities in current releases than I ever planned at the start.
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