I thought that those of you who attended the spam BoF last week might be interested to note the IMC survey of publicly-known relaying smtp servers. Regards, John
X-Sender: phoffman@mail.imc.org Date: Mon, 02 Feb 1998 20:20:36 -0800 To: imc-update@imc.org From: Paul Hoffman / IMC <phoffman@imc.org> Subject: IMC Update for February, 1998 Mime-Version: 1.0 Sender: owner-imc-update@imc.org Precedence: bulk
Welcome to the February 1998 issue of the IMC Update. We hope you find lots of interesting news about Internet mail here.
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IMC News
IMC Releases Report on Relaying through SMTP Servers
Many people in the fight against unsolicited bulk email (UBE) believe that not allowing UBE senders to use SMTP gateways unrelated to their business would reduce the amount of UBE. Further, many companies who have had UBE sent through their SMTP servers have suffered losses in time and money dealing with responses sent to them.
To date, there have only been anecdotal reports on how many publicly-known SMTP servers allowed anyone to relay through them. Because the reported percentages varied widely, and the test methodologies went unstated, IMC recently tested a large random sample of SMTP servers to see how many of them allowed relaying from users not within their realm. The results of the tests, as well as the test methodology, are detailed in the latest IMC Report at <http://www.imc.org/ube-relay.html>.
DNSConnect 1 Leads to Greater Interoperability for Users
IMC hosted DNSConnect 1 on January 27 to help bring together vendors of DNS and DHCP clients and servers. Although these areas are only tangentially related to Internet mail, they are becoming much more important to Internet mail users who rely on DHCP for their Internet connections. The event went very well, and it was the first time that many of the vendors had met face-to-face. It was determined that the recent specifications for dynamic update of DNS records and DNS-to-DHCP interactions work well and that server and client software from different vendors will soon interact extremely well.
New IMC Member Announced
IMC is happy to announce that Lansoft, an Internet mail and gateway service provider, has become a member of IMC.
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Internet Mail in the Press
IMC often advises the press about important Internet mail issues. We also often point reporters towards the products and services of our members so that the articles don't quote IMC but instead quote others in the Internet mail industry. However, we also get quoted often in stories on a variety of topics.
In our ongoing efforts to reduce unsolicited bulk email and reduce its harms, we have been quoted in the San Francisco Daily Journal (a newspaper for lawyers), the San Jose Mercury News (the newspaper of record for Silicon Valley), and Business Online (a German Internet monthly). On topics
other than UBE, Network World recently covered IMC's contribution to the IETF's review of Year 2000 issues with Internet protocols as well as IMC's stewardship of the vCard technology, and the EMA's "Messaging Magazine" carried an article written by IMC director Paul Hoffman about what Internet mail will look like a few years from now.
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Upcoming Events
Internet Expo, February 10-12, San Jose, CA. IMC Director Paul Hoffman will lead a discussion about standards for secure email at this popular conference. <http://www.dci.com/internet/>
Internet World, March 9-13, Los Angeles, CA. A very large gathering of the Internet marketplace. IMC will hold an informal member's meeting during the event; details will be announced when confirmed with the event's sponsors. <http://events.internet.com/spring98/>
NDSS'98: Symposium on Network & Distributed System Security, March 11-13, San Diego, CA. Security is always an issue with large mail systems. This conference is sponsored by the Internet Society (ISOC). <http://www.isoc.org/ndss98/>
41st IETF Meeting, March 30 - April 3, Los Angeles, CA. IETF meetings always have a great deal of interest for companies in the Internet mail business, and this one should be no different. Many mail-related working groups will meet, and technologies related to mail will also be covered. <http://www.ietf.org/meetings/LosAngeles.html>
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Recent Standards News
International characters and language support have always been an important topic for Internet mail. Although some mail clients do a much better job of non-English languages than others, there is a strong desire from many customers for good international support for sending and receiving Internet mail.
Three new RFCs that relate to internationalization have recently been released.
* RFC 2277, "IETF Policy on Character Sets and Languages&qout;, is the current policies being applied by the Internet Engineering Steering Group (IESG) towards the standardization efforts in the IETF in order to help Internet protocols fulfill these requirements. It is a Best Current Practices document, and is full of information useful to Internet mail implementors and protocol designers.
* RFC 2278, "IANA Charset Registration Procedures&qout;, describes the method to register a new character set with the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA). Although almost every character set currently used with Internet mail is already assigned, some groups use alternate character sets and want their designations to be usable by other protocol designers.
* RFC 2279, "UTF-8, a Transformation Format of ISO 10646" is an update of RFC 2044. ISO/IEC 10646-1 defines a multi-octet character set called the Universal Character Set (UCS) which encompasses most of the world's writing systems. Multi-octet characters, however, are not compatible with many current applications and protocols, and this has led to the development of a few so-called UCS transformation formats (UTFs), each of which has different characteristics. This document describes UTF-8, which has the characteristic of preserving the full US-ASCII range, providing compatibility with file systems, parsers and other software that rely on US-ASCII values but are transparent to other values.
A complete list of mail-related Internet standards is available at <http://www.imc.org/mail-standards.html>.
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