Building the Internet with sendmail's Eric Allman

About this episode

Scott Hanselman interviews Eric Allman about the origins of internet email and the challenges of building software at a global scale.

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.

People in this episode

Host: Scott Hanselman

Guest: Eric Allman

Topics covered

• internet
• email
• software engineering
• technology history
• system design

Keywords

• internet
• email
• Sendmail
• software
• engineering
• technology
• design decisions

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: ACM ByteCast

Products: Sendmail

More episodes of Hanselminutes with Scott Hanselman

• Cloud Commitments Without the Lock-In with Archera's Aran Khanna · May 14, 2026 · 32 min
• How IBM Z Is Modernizing Mainframes with Skyla Loomis · May 7, 2026 · 32 min
• Making opinionated AI tooling decisions with Nimbalyst's Greg Hinkle · April 30, 2026 · 32 min
• The Joy of Unplugging Cables: Kelly Shortridge on Security Resilience · April 23, 2026 · 33 min
• Why Tori Westerhoff says we should talk to strangers · April 9, 2026 · 36 min
• A cognition engine for science with Allen Stewart · March 12, 2026 · 31 min