It’s in the mail

See correction below

SENDMAIL IS THE venerable technology that moves the majority of electronic mail across the Internet. But the cryptic nature of Sendmail has limited its use to the backbone network while Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Notes emerged as the dominant corporate e-mail systems. In an interview with InfoWorld Editor in Chief Michael Vizard, Sendmail Chairman and Co-founder Greg Olson talks about how Sendmail, which recently signed an alliance with McAfee.com, is rapidly emerging as the first line of defense for companies doing business on the Internet and a more viable alternative for reining in skyrocketing e-mail costs.

InfoWorld: How has Sendmail evolved over the last few years?

InfoWorld: What the relationship between Sendmail and other e-mail systems?

Olson: Most people [who] are running non-trivial Exchange and Notes configurations have Sendmail behind it doing the routing and providing the presence on the public Internet. And there are some good reasons for that. If you’ve got 50 Exchange servers, you don’t put 50 Exchange servers directly on the Internet. You almost certainly will be using Sendmail as the hub and as the secure presence on the Internet. The first reason for that is security. The Internet’s a pretty dangerous place these days. But Sendmail is the proven solution. In fact, there hasn’t even been a security posting for an outside vulnerability to Sendmail in two or three years. Secondly, it performs a lot better, it scales a lot better, and with our new commercial products it’s much more manageable. The norm, if you’re of significant size, is to use Sendmail for the backbone no matter what you’re using elsewhere.

InfoWorld: So in a way you can extend those capabilities all the way out to something like Microsoft Outlook?

Olson: Absolutely. We’ve been real successful with this and we’ve upgraded, at this point, 20 percent of the Fortune 1000 [companies]. We have about 12,000 corporate customers with 33,000 licenses since we started shipping.

InfoWorld: So what will Sendmail the company be focused on next?

Olson: One area is the backbone and the idea of content management for mail. This starts with an area that some people think of as security, which is virus protection. But it’s really scanning the content and looking for bad code in there. Content management has come to be much broader … because all the business processes are now going on e-mail. In many industries, for instance, there [are] regulations that now come into play. So, for instance, in securities you’ve got to archive and audit and you probably want to put disclaimers. All kinds of companies are now looking at their routing infrastructure to do this sort of thing, but at the desktop it’s hopeless. You can’t make everybody’s desktop do this reliably as a policy. Doing it across 50 Exchange servers, if you’re a distributed company, is also pretty hopeless. You can never get them all in sync. So we provide these services as part of the backbone network.

InfoWorld: How is this done using Sendmail?

Olson: We’ve built a plug-in architecture so that you can drop these filters in, and they’re very efficient. In particular, there is virus filtering, which filters [mail] as it comes off the Net. So you don’t even accept bad stuff into the environment. The only way to have an environment that isn’t full of disease is to make sure it’s sanitary.

InfoWorld: Where else can these filters be applied?

Olson: It’s also particularly important for things like harassment. Companies are now liable if employees send harassing e-mail to each other. The technology is now available to detect that so the companies are now deemed responsible by the courts.

InfoWorld: Can filters be used to effectively fight spam?

Olson: Spam is a content management problem and there are a couple of approaches for that. But it’s guerilla war. You develop tools to detect and stop the stuff and then the spammers go out and figure out how to get around it. It’s not something that we’ll ever cure. It’s something that we can control by staying on top of it and ahead of. But we need some new tools. We do offer spam solutions as part of the content management suite. And there are very strong solutions, like Bright Mail is the premium solution in this case. But it’s expensive.

InfoWorld: If people were to adopt Sendmail internally, what fundamentally differentiates Sendmail from other systems?

Olson: What we can do is give people access to their mail anywhere. The advantages of our solution vary depending on your company or whether you’re a service provider. But for corporate users, the advantage is that our stuff is much lower cost and much easier to manage. Exchange is cantankerous and expensive. It tends to cost companies about $30 a month per seat, even if they’re well managed. A lot of that is administrative cost. Our solutions are down in the $5 to $10 range. If you look at the cost of providing e-mail to everyone in a company, the cost of providing that and Exchange is ridiculous — it doesn’t fly. We’ve been very active with companies providing a lower-cost alternative to Exchange and in fact we’ve even gone a step further. We are providing the calendaring and scheduling applications in a Web-based form as well. Exchange doesn’t have economies of scale. In fact it [has] dis-economies of scale. The more you get, the harder it is to manage. We can provide scalability up into the millions and it’s still very easy to administer. There does seem to be some tremendous interest in finding something that’s less painful, less expensive, and more secure and reliable than Exchange.

InfoWorld: How does Sendmail help keep the storage costs associated with e-mail under control?

Olson: Our mail system is a single-image system. So if you’ve got multiple copies of an e-mail, there’s only one in storage. That makes a huge difference in terms of the cost of the infrastructure, particularly over time, as things grow.

InfoWorld: What impact is encryption having on e-mail systems?

Olson: There is a growing trend towards end-to-end encryption. At this stage it’s a very early stage of the market, and there are 56 companies offering different and largely incompatible solutions out there. But it is coming. As soon as you have that, you also need the policy management in the back end to control how it’s used. Today, if you’ve got end-to-end encrypted mail going in and out of your company, it’s probably somebody dealing drugs or sending or receiving pornography inside your company. But ultimately that’s something that I think will become a standard, particularly with e-mail now coming into broad use for things like financial statements or bills. Many of those documents have to be privacy protected.

InfoWorld: Everyone today has multiple e-mail addresses that are becoming harder to manage. Is this ever going to be simplified in an intelligent way?

Olson: It’s going to get worse before it gets better because we’re about to increase that number, particularly with a bunch of wireless devices and with applications that talk to us through the e-mail infrastructure. As individuals, we’re going to have a very challenging problem. The biggest challenge is what’s called “unified communications” or “integrated communications.” Whether it’s a voice message or an e-mail message from my daughter’s school, I want to get it on whatever device I have, instantly. But I don’t want to plug into 15 different applications that are giving me alerts. We need to able to program that hierarchy of communication. It’s certainly possible to glue all that stuff together now. We could forward messages from anything to anything as long as it’s meaningful. But providing the directory services and the user interface that would allow you and [me] to tell it how to do what we want it to do is a big challenge that’s going to take some time. If we built this all and integrate it, it would be fine, but we’ll never get to do that.

InfoWorld: How has the changing economy affected Sendmail?

Olson: Last year was a horrible year for the Internet industry. But we grew 50 percent. It was such a bad year that nobody was buying anything unless it was absolutely broken and they couldn’t live without it. Today people are looking at investments to save money. Last year, we grew 50 percent because e-mail had expanded beyond what their systems could do. They had to fix it even though they didn’t want to. So the growth is relentless. We still get more e-mail every day. It’s relentless. So that just creates more demand for servers.

Correction

In this interview, we originally misreported Greg Olson’s title.