what's up with sendmail commands ending with linefeed only?

  Today I isolated an SMTP interoperability problem which was induced by
  the fact that  V8.6.12 sendmail terminates it's SMTP commands with
  linefeed instead of <CR><LF>.  Perhaps this is configurable via
  sendmail.cf but doesn't the standard clearly state that SMTP commands are
  to be terminated by <CR><LF> (mine does)?

  I'm hoping that someone will answer the following questions so that I can
  choose the best strategy to resolve this delema.
  1)  Are there many versions of sendmail (or other MTA implementations)
  that terminate 821 command lines with just a linefeed char?
  2) Is this a known sendmail glitch (bug) that happened fairly recently
  that is fixed ??  or should MTA implementations be modified to accept it
  since there are many versions of sendmail out there doing this already?

  thanks for any pointers,
  Mike