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Building the Internet with sendmail's Eric Allman

Building the Internet with sendmail's Eric Allman

Show #1041 Mar 19 2026 Podcast Player with Transcript Help edit or fix transcripts here!

In this episode, in association with the ACM ByteCast, Scott talks with Eric Allman, one of the foundational figures of the early internet. Best known for creating Sendmail, the mail transfer agent that powered a large portion of global email infrastructure through the formative years of the network, Allman helped shape how messages move across the internet. Their conversation explores the origins of internet email, the messy realities of building software that must operate at planetary scale, and what lessons today’s engineers can learn from the systems and design decisions that quietly underpin modern computing.

This episode sponsored by Text Control

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