The LA Fox Developer Newsletter

June 1998

Spam Alert (Con't from page 4)

united to support House of Representatives Bill 1748 (HR 1748) sponsered by Rep. Chris Smith. HR 1748 is a strong bill that truly protects Internet users and is supported by almost all ISPs (except those owned by direct e-mail marketers, of course). It applies the same principles that killed unsolicited fax advertising to unsolicited e-mail advertising.

Unfortunately, as is the case in Washington, money talks and the direct marketing associations have had success in passing a bill using their wording. It has passed the Senate and is headed for the House. It could become law if Internet users stand by and let it happen. But we don’t have to do that! We can get amendments to these bills passed or kill them and get HR 1748 passed, but we have to let our feelings be known

**right away**.

If you value the right to keep advertising out of your e-mail, please do the following:

Call your Representative and Senators *IMMEDIATELY* Tell them:

1. You are deeply concerned about junk email. (You can join CAUCE at http://www.cauce.org).

2. You strongly support H.R. 1748, and you believe that S.1618 and its counterpart language in H.R. 3888 does not address the concerns of users.

3. You support GAUGE’s proposed changes to S.1618/

H.R.3888. (If they need any more information, send them to the

CAUCE website.)

If you know your Representative’s and Senators’ names, call them at: 202-224-3121. (Everyone in Congress can be reached via this phone number). If you’re not sure who your representative is, go to the House of Representatives web site http:// www.house.gov/writerep/and look it up from your zip code. Senate information is available at http://www.senate.gov/senator/ state.html.

Call Congressman Tauzin’s office and tell him:

1. You are a strong supporter of Rep. Smith’s H.R.1748.

2. You want his subcommittee to hold hearings on *ALL* the proposed “anti-spam” legislation -- especially H.R.1748.

3. You want his subcommittee to amend H.R.3888 to include CAUCE’s proposed changes.

Congressman Tauzin can be reached at voice: 202-225-4031, fax: 202-225-0563. If those numbers don’t work, or if the lines are busy, you can contact his subcommittee directly at: 202-

225-2927.

We are at a critical juncture in the fight against spam. The few moments you spend on the phone today can help keep your email flowing tomorrow! If you need more information about why CAUCE opposes the bill, please see their detailed analysis at the CAUCE web site <http://www.cauce.org>.

Thanks for reading this! You can help affect the quality of your Internet experience tomorrow by acting today. Again, if spam is not currently a problem for you, please understand that as your use of the Internet increases, spam will start showing up in your mailbox. It is very aggravating. It is a waste of your time and money. It is endless (unless these bills are passed). It is deceitful (many spammers say “you’ll only receive this once” and you read that in each of the 10 or 12 messages they send you - others say you can “unsubscribe” but if you follow their instructions to do that, all you are doing is telling them that your address is still active and they swamp you with even more advertising). It is obnoxious. It is pollution! This is something we have to fight. Please take the time to help fight unsolicited commercial e-mail.

A number of products are making themselves available to combat what I can only describe as the “virtual disease” of the 90’s and beyond:

Announcing Sendmail 8.9 - The Spam Control Release (free download)

Sendmail 8.9 includes a number of features. With each release the sendinail development team focuses on the most important issues in the request list. This year there is no doubt that managing spam is the most important issue in electronic mail distribution. Sendmail 8.9 includes an arsenal of tools for spam control. It also contains achitectural changes that will result in more reliable error reporting, and a variety of maintenance upgrades.

Tools for SDam Control

The spam control features in 8.9 fall into two areas: repackaging of features that already existed in 8.8 but were difficult to configure and totally new features.

Conflauration Chanaes

Promiscuous relaying is turned off by default. Disallow mail having an invalid host name in the return address by default.

By default, disallow acceptance of mail from any sender

that has does not have a fully qualified domain name. FEATURE(relay_entire_domain)to allow relaying within

your domain.

Optional access control database allowing rejection of

mail from specific domains.

FEATURE(rbl) to enable use of the Realtime Blackhole

List maintained at http://maps.vix.com/rbl.

New Features

Regular expression matching on addresses (e.g., allnumeric user names can be rejected).

amounts of messages being sent at one time to

(Con’t, page 6)

Page 5