IMC Update for February, 1998

[John Martin <]

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

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>Date: Mon, 02 Feb 1998 20:20:36 -0800
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>From: Paul Hoffman / IMC phoffman@localhost
>Subject: IMC Update for February, 1998
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>Welcome to the February 1998 issue of the IMC Update. We hope you find lots
>of interesting news about Internet mail here.
>
>------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>                                  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.
>
>------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>                         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.
>
>------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>                              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>
>
>------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>                           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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