The sendmail 8.10 release, now out in beta, makes it clear that even after two decades, sendmail is still plenty young enough to be learning new tricks. One of these is sendmail 8.10's integration with LDAP, the lightweight directory access protocol. While the first defining standard for LDAP is almost five years old now, it's just in the last year that marketing campaigns have spread this acronym across the trade magazines. Architectures for authentication Think for a moment, in the most abstract terms, about what sendmail does.
Someone gives it a message and an addressee.
If so, it delivers the message. Otherwise, it bounces. The benefit that all these generalizations promise is to modularize management of email accounts as separate from host user accounts. Suppose you're in charge of a mail server with 2,000 users. It's not convenient, though.