The LA Fox Developer Newsletter

June 1998

Spam Alert (Con't from page 5)

multiple users (a common characteristic of spam).

•

Feature to extract all MX records for a given domain;

this allows a site to allow relaying only for hosts for

which they are a valid MX server.

•

Distinguish between temporary and permanent map

lookup failures. This allows better rejection of SMTP

envelope senders that have invalid host names.

Allow message rejection on the basis of header con-

tents. For example, messages with invalid Message-Id:

headers or a “To: friend@public.com” header can be

rejected.

Limit the size of HELO/EHLO parameter to prevent

spammers from hiding their connection information in

Received: headers.

•

New builtin “discard” mailer to allow messages to be

accepted and then dropped.

A complete technical description of changes in sendmail 8.9 is

at http://www.sendmail.org.

If you’re interested in joining the spam-fight and/or just want to

find out more, try these sights:

http://www.ao.net/waytosuccess/nospam.html

http://www.ybecker.net/pink/

http://www.ao.net/waytosuccess/newbie.html

http://www.ybecker.net/

http://www.senate.gov/~murkowski/commercialemail/

http://www.ybecker.net/murkowski/contact.html

http://healines.yahoo.com/Full_Coverage/Tech/

Spam_Wars/

http://kryten.eng.monash.edu.au/gspam.html

http://www.stopspam.org/

http://spam.ohww.norman.ok.us/notice.htm

http://www.ecofuture.org/ecofuture/jnkmail.html

(Contributors to this article include the fine folks at CAUCE

(http://www.cauce.org), Russell Campbell of the Atlanta FUG,

and yours truly, Barry R. Lee. Let’s all fight the fight.]

Visual FoxPro Weds

Web to Data

By Maggie Biggs

With the beta version of Visual FoxPro 6.0, Professional

Edition, Microsoft has successfully morphed the product from

its xBase roots of some 14 years ago into an integrated devel-

opment platform that today is ideal for traditional client/server

projects, Web applications, and the creation of database-related

components. Visual FoxPro developers and those seeking a

solid development solution for enterprise-grade projects should

consider the production release, which is due this summer.

As a development platform, the added support for transaction

management, Web applications, the graphical component

gallery, prebuilt classes, and more, places Visual FoxPro in

serious contention with its competitors, such as PowerBuilder,

from Sybase, and Delphi, from Inprise (formerly Borland).

Visual FoxPro has always been strong in the area of database

development, and the additions to this area also stiffen competi-

tion for rivals such as Oracle’s Developer/2000, which I will

review soon.

Microsoft still needs to do some tweaking to this version of

Visual FoxPro before it is ready to go out the door. During my

tests I found several beta instabilities.

For example, just after installation in my Windows NT 4.0

environments, I received a plethora of strange error messages. I

also was disappointed at two things I found when I looked at

Microsoft’s new Active Document support for Visual FoxPro.

The Active Document feature lets developers run Visual FoxPro

applications inside a Web browser.

During my Active Document tests, some of my applications

executed flawlessly in the browser and others appeared only

partially. Also, the Active Document feature supports only

Microsoft’s Internet Explorer.

Power and productivity

Beta woes aside, Visual FoxPro is as strong as ever when it

comes to handling data in applications. This version adds some

new power by offering integration with Microsoft’s Transaction

Server and support for OLE for DB — enabling access to

relational and nonrelational data stores. Furthermore, changes

to data-formatting features offer complete compliance for year-

2000 projects.

Notable wizards

Notable in this version are several new wizards and more than

100 prebuilt classes that can be easily reused. In particular, I

liked both the Application Wizard and the Application Builder.

The former helped me quickly build skeleton frameworks for

(Con’t, page 8)

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