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BT, Postfix and Others Recognized for Contributions to the Evolution of Internet Mail

Awards Presented at Sendmail 25 Years of Internet Mail Event, October 25th at the Computer History Museum in California

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. – October 25th, 2006 – Today at its 25 Years of Internet Mail celebration event, taking place at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, Sendmail, Inc., the leading global provider of trusted messaging, announced the recipients of its inaugural Innovation Awards. Eight recipients from across the globe were recognized for the dramatic impact they have made to Internet communications and security using Sendmail technology. Of note, awards were given to BT (formerly British Telecom) for their “breakthrough in content inspection gateways”; TPC.int for using the Sendmail MTA to deliver the first Internet-based paging/FAX solution; and Tim Martin for SMTP Authentication, the predominant Internet authentication method in use today.

The Sendmail Innovation Awards honored companies in three categories: Innovative Use of the Sendmail Mail Transfer Agent (MTA); Innovative Open Source Contribution and Sendmail Milter Innovation. Drawing from Sendmail’s roots in innovation and with a vision for the future of secure and trusted messaging, Sendmail selected the award winners after evaluating hundreds of enterprise deployment scenarios and contributions to Open Source. Each of the winners demonstrated excellence in developing one-of-a-kind Internet Mail solutions showing unusual creativity, providing best practice standards and providing measurable impact on solving real-world problems.

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EMEA Winner: Jose Marcio Martins da Cruz, Ecole des Mines de Paris – for his contributions to libmilter (the library that implements the Milter protocol and provides the API to applications). This contribution delivered an alternative implementation of the threading model, providing improved performance for operating systems such as Linux.

milter (libmilter based mail filters) are multithreaded programs. libmilter provides a nice API to milters to allow them communicate with sendmail MTA and filter e-mails on the fly. Communications between the milter and the MTA are completely handled by the library.

For each new SMTP connection to the MTA, libmilter launches a new thread inside the milter and assign this thread to the handling of that connection. When the connection is closed, libmilter terminates that thread.

So, if the MTA is handling N connections, there will be N threads inside the milter. This is a problem with huge servers handling hundreds connections simultaneously.

The contribution is an alternative thread model for libmilter. The author noticed that each connection was really active usually not more than 1/100 of its life time. The idea is to launch, when the filter starts, a number of threads which is usually equal to the number of CPUs in the computer. These threads will remain alive while the filter will be alive. When the libmilter will receive a new command from the MTA, it will look for an idle thread and assign the task to it. Only if there isn't any idle thread, a new one will be launched. This way, the number of threads inside the filter will be reduced to the mean number of active connections, instead the total number of open SMTP connections.

This contribution was integrated into sendmail release 8.14.0.

This award also recognizes an older contribution to sendmail - the connection rate control and the number connections opened simultaneously by a SMTP client, which was integrated into sendmail release 8.13.0.

Sendmail Announces Winners of Its First Annual Innovation Awards

Sendmail Celebrates 25 Years of Open Internet Mail Standard

Sendmail Recognises European Winners of Inaugural Innovation Award

Sendmail Celebrates 25 Years of Internet Mail - The event

http://www.cgidir.com/news/news/061026SendmailInnovationAwards.html

This is the second of a series of annual publications of the selected papers from TERENA Networking Conferences.

The papers published here represent the best of the papers presented at the TERENA Networking Conference 2005 in Poznan, Poland. Over one hundred and sixty extended abstracts were submitted in response to the call for papers, and after review, sixty-two of these were chosen by the Programme Committee for presentation at the conference. In addition, seventy-two recognised experts in their field were invited to give presentations at the conference.

All speakers were then invited to submit full papers for potential selection for this publication of the conference proceedings, and after review by the Programme Committee and other experts when necessary, those that were finally selected are published here.

The papers represent a good mix of subjects covering the entire breadth of the main themes of the conference.

The programme committee was composed of members of the TERENA community in Europe and from our sister organisation in the United States.

TNC2005 Proceedings

TERENA - Trans-European Research and Education Networking Association