Sendmail, an open source product used by many ISPs and major companies, is going commercial this week as the designer of the mail router program launches the first "for sale" product.

Eric Allman, chief technical officer of Sendmail, wrote the first version of the program 18 years ago to route messages between the University of California at Berkeley's computer systems and Arpanet, the government computer network that preceded the Internet.

Sendmail's source code has been openly available and over the years programmers and network administrators have contributed to its growth by deploying, developing and refining the program.

There are currently more than 1.5 million copies of the open source Sendmail installed, representing more than 75 per cent of all Internet mail servers.

Sendmail is a server based message transfer agent that distributes mail between the Internet and servers running email programs such as Lotus Notes and Microsoft Exchange.

"To respond to the diverse needs of Sendmail's user community, we formed the company," said Allman. "For commercial users, ease of use features and services that reduce the need for internal support are becoming necessities. It's an idea whose time has come."

Sendmail Pro offers Sendmail with tools to simplify deployment, administration and management, including: ready to use binary installation of Sendmail; the Sendmail Pro browser interface; and a wizard for creating new sendmail configuration files.

Web based graphical configuration tools for updating existing configurations are also included as well as anti-spam integration to reduce the cost of controlling unsolicited mail.

The company plans to release at least one major open source software release every year, followed by a new version of the commercial product.

"In our recent study of ISPs in the US and Europe, we found that a vast majority of firms are reluctant to migrate off of Sendmail," said Mark Levitt, research director at International Data Corporation, "Sendmail's commercial products offer these firms the ability to 'upgrade' to a richer function version of Sendmail."

Sendmail's upgrade strategy includes an E-Commerce site, telesales and field sales. Its third party channels include OEMs such as Sun Microsystems, BSDi, Red Hat Linux, HP and IBM.

The software will initially run on NT, Free BSD, Sun Solaris and Red Hat Linux with other Unix versions to come.