OpenSMTPD is primarily developed by Gilles Chehade, Eric Faurot and Charles Longeau as part of the OpenBSD project.

Its design goals include security, reliability, ease of configuration, and support for common use cases.

The portable version was initiated by Charles Longeau and adds support for multiple operating systems including NetBSD, FreeBSD, DragonFly BSD, and several Linux distributions.

[5][6] OpenSMTPD was designed to solve these problems and make mail exchanges accessible to a wider user-base.

[10] On 28 January 2020, a vulnerability in OpenSMTPD was disclosed that could be remotely exploited to run arbitrary shell commands as root.