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Re: IMC Update for February, 1998
by John Martin 10 Feb '98

10 Feb '98

Piet, At 12:03 pm +0100 10/2/98, Piet Beertema wrote: > 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. > >The problem with this survey is that it is by no means >exhaustive (500 mail hosts is in fact peanuts compared >to the number of mail hosts globally), and probably for >that reason doesn't mention the names of the hosts that >allow relaying. [If you remember, "naming-and-shaming" was thought to be unconstructive when discussed at the recent RIPE anti-SPAM BoF meeting. Is this what you mean? Personally, I think that this is a bit too agressive.] Perhaps a compromise is to compile a list of offenders and then contact the domain administrator for that host? (A standard canned message akin to the DNS "Lame server" one would do, I guess...?) We didn't actually discuss this at the meeting. My reading of the IMC report was that it was intended to show a "a large random sample" but I suppose that 500 is indeed small compared with 1) the number of MX records in the DNS and 2) the number of hosts accepting SMTP connections (larger). (For comparison, when I was analysing the COM domains last year to determine physical locations, I used 2 separate samples of 50,000 each - there were ~1,100,000 domains in the zone at the time.) Note though that the IMC report makes no further comment nor claim about the applicability of its results more generally than the 3000 domains known to the IMC itself (though its mailing lists), except for the implicit comment (I guess) that those subscribed to IMC lists should really know better ;-) It does, however, state that an update will be forthcoming. >A flaw in the test is that it used a valid domain name; >using an invalid domain name (or a separate test using >an invalid domain name) would probably have led to more >refusals. Hmmm. But most spammers use valid domains these days, dont they? Are there admisistrators who implement only the check_relay and not the check_from at the same time? My impression was that it is usually an all-or-nothing decision thugh I suppse check_from puts a much higher (DNS) load / delay on the relay? >Even so it is shocking that 55% of the set of mail hosts >tested apparently allows unrestricted relaying. Indeed. My guess is that this is a conservative figure but, as you say, 55% is still too much. However, as was discussed at the meeting, even reducing the number of relaying hosts might not significantly reduce the amount of spam - it only takes one and relaying hosts are being added daily... John

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TERENA Networking Conference (TNC'98) - Call for Papers
by Naomi de Bruyn 10 Feb '98

10 Feb '98

** REMINDER ** CALL FOR PAPERS "TERENA Networking Conference" (TNC'98) Dresden, Germany, 5-8 October 1998 The TNC'98 "Call for Papers" paper submission deadline is approaching (deadline: 20 February 1998) Please visit the TERENA Networking Conference 1998 Web site for further details at: http://www.terena.nl/tnc98 For general enquiries please send a message to <tnc98-sec(a)terena.nl> or contact TNC'98 Secretariat c/o TERENA Secretariat Singel 466-468 NL - 1017 AW Amsterdam The Netherlands Tel: +31 20 639 1131 Fax: +31 20 639 3289 Email: tnc98-sec(a)terena.nl

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IMC Update for February, 1998
by John Martin 03 Feb '98

03 Feb '98

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(a)mail.imc.org >Date: Mon, 02 Feb 1998 20:20:36 -0800 >To: imc-update(a)imc.org >From: Paul Hoffman / IMC <phoffman(a)imc.org> >Subject: IMC Update for February, 1998 >Mime-Version: 1.0 >Sender: owner-imc-update(a)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. > >------------------------------------------------------------------------ > > 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>. > >------------------------------------------------------------------------ > > About This Mailing List > >The IMC Update is a low-volume, one-way mailing list to inform people about >news in the Internet mail industry. Subscription is open to all, members >and non-members. If you have questions about the content of IMC Update, or >suggestions or information for future issues, please send them to >phoffman(a)imc.org. General information about the IMC is available from ><http://www.imc.org/>. > >To subscribe to this mailing list, send a message to >imc-update-request(a)imc.org with the single word > subscribe >in the body of the message. To unsubscribe, use the same address, but use >the word > unsubscribe >in the body of the message. >

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New Document available: RIPE-177
by RIPE NCC Document Annoucement Service 23 Jan '98

23 Jan '98

New/Revised RIPE Document Announcement -------------------------------------- A revised/new document is available from the RIPE document store. Ref: ripe-177 Title: RIPE CENTR Proposal Author: Paul Ridley Date: 23 January 1998 Format: PS=105584 TXT=21000 Obsoletes: Obsoleted by: Updates: Updated by: See also: Short content description ------------------------- This document is a proposal for the setting up of RIPE CENTR. The document outlines the goals and structure of the future organisation and describes a transition plan. This plan proposes that RIPE CENTR initially starts as a RIPE NCC project, before it eventually be spun off as a seperate legal entity. Accessing the RIPE document store --------------------------------- The RIPE document store is available via anonymous FTP to ftp.ripe.net, in the directory ripe/docs. The URLs for the new documents on the FTP-server are: ftp://ftp.ripe.net/ripe/docs/ripe-177.ps PostScript version ftp://ftp.ripe.net/ripe/docs/ripe-177.txt plain text version You can also access the RIPE documents in HTML format via WWW. RIPE-177 is available from the WWW , at the following URL: http://www.ripe.net/docs/ripe-177.html Documents can also be retrieved from the RIPE document store using a mail server program. For more information on how to use the program, send email to <mail-server(a)ripe.net> with "send HELP" in the body text.

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RIPE 29 payment details (was: Re: meeting?)
by Steven Bakker 20 Jan '98

20 Jan '98

>>>>> On Fri, 9 Jan 1998, "MN" == Mike Norris wrote: MN> Register now, Geza, with the option to pay later. That's what I did, but see below. MN> There is no surcharge provided you're **registered** before 18th Jan. MN> That's the way I read it and I trust the NCC agree ;-) Unfortunately, no, they don't. I just received a message from the RIPE NCC Meeting Registration telling me that I will be charged an additional 50 ECU if I _pay_ on site (credit card or cash makes no difference). That was NOT the message I got from the information provided to me earlier (on the web and through the ripe-list). However, I hesitate to provide my CC details with the currently available technique: Fax: The last two times I did this by fax, my card was charged a total of 5(!) times for two meetings. I was told this was due to a fault in the NCC's fax machine, causing multiple copies of my card details to be printed, and hence my card was charged more than once(?). Nevertheless, it took me several iterations to get this fixed, which leads me to the conclusion the process is not foolproof. E-mail: I wouldn't mind sending it by PGP encrypted e-mail, but that's not an option at this moment. And just plaintext e-mail is, well, too primitive. If the NCC can guarantee me that they have bought a proper functioning fax machine in the meantime, or provide me with a RIPE NCC PGP public key, I will consider sending the details. Once bitten, twice shy. Cheers, Steven -- Film Fact #43: Having a job of any kind will make all fathers forget their son's eighth birthday.

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Agenda: Deployment of anti-spam measures BoF
by John Martin 19 Jan '98

19 Jan '98

Announcement: Deployment of anti-spam measures BoF Date: Wednesday 28th January 14:00-17:00 Convenor: John Martin Location: Park Plaza Hotel, Rokin, Amsterdam Unsolicited Commercial Email, (UCE or "spam" as it is more colloquially known), is a well known and established problem on the internet today. Many users now regularly receive 10's of these messages per day - sometimes more. Anti-spam measures range from blocking of IP addresses at gateways / hubs to sophisticated "learning" algorithms which operate at the user end. However, these measures are often not straightforward and are not, lamentably, very widely deployed. The purpose of this BoF is to determine whether effective measures can be taken to deploy these measures more widely within our constituency and will concentrate on a managable subset - email-spam and deployment of anti-spam measures - rather than the wider problems or issues (which are discussed elsewhere). DRAFT Agenda 1. Welcome and Introductions 2. Brief Overview of anti-spam (email-only) mechanisms* - particular emphasis on maximum effect for least pain 3. Determination of possible wide-scale deployment mechanisms - measures most likely to succeed - how to deploy? 4. What next? - Formation of more permanent working group? - Longer-term plans 5. A.O.B 6. Close. The meeting is a joint TERENA / RIPE iniative and is open to all. Please send comments / suggestions to me ASAP. Regards, John (*For information about anti-spam measures, see http://spam.abuse.net/)

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RIPE 29 Meeting Schedule
by RIPE NCC Meeting Registration 14 Jan '98

14 Jan '98

Dear Colleagues, After taking into account the input from the wg-chairs, the following is the firm schedule for RIPE 29. 28.01.98 29.01.98 ----------------- ---------------------------- Room 1 Room 2 Room 1 Room 2 Room 3 9:00 +----------+----------+ +----------+----------+-------------+ 10:30 | Routing | DNS | | TLD | EIX | Mbone | +----------+----------+ +----------+----------+-------------+ 11:00 +----------+----------+ +----------+----------+-------------+ | LIR | Netnews | | TLD | EIX | IPv6 | 12:30 +----------+----------+ +----------+----------+-------------+ 14:00 +----------+----------+ +----------+ | DB | SPAM BoF | | plenary | 15:30 +----------+----------+ +----------+ 16:00 +----------+----------+ +----------+ | DB | SPAM BoF | | plenary | 17:30 +----------+----------+ +----------+ 30.01.98 -------- Room 1 9:00 +-----------+ | plenary | +-----------+ 11:00 +-----------+ | plenary | 12:30 +-----------+ 14:00 +-----------+ | plenary | 15:30 +-----------+ 17:30 +-----------+ Kind regards, Naomi de Bruyn RIPE Meeting Registration

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meeting?
by Turchanyi Geza 12 Jan '98

12 Jan '98

Dear All, I do not know how many of us are in similar situation as me, however I have some bad feeling. Something definitely goes in a wrong direction. The RIPE meetings used to be a combination of festivity and work. Then many things changed. Some of them had to, unfortunately, some of them probably should not. Yesterday I was able to check on-line the list of attendees already registered and this is a positive sign: the process is well robotized. However, there were only 81 people on the list, 33 amongst them from the RIPE NCC, that is roughly 40 percent. And we have only ten days left to avoid the punishment of the extra 50 ECU registration fee increase. What I should have to pay anyhow, if I would be able to persuade my boss(es) to sign my travel form without presenting them a complete meeting plan, as I do not have credit card, and check and banktransfer is not accepted, and on-site paying penalized. Well, something should not be robotized, I guess. Hope to see you sometimes, somewhere, Geza Turchanyi

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monthly hostcount figures revisited
by e07＠nikhef.nl 11 Jan '98

11 Jan '98

The monthly hostcount survey always yields interesting figures. Most attention goes to the (change of) number of ``hosts'', but it would be nice to keep track of the (change of) number of zones (SOA count) as well. Especially remarkable is the average number of hosts per zone. Below are the statistics for the december 1997 TLDs with more than 3000 zones. Note the large deviation from the average for the "dk" and "fi" TLD at both ends of the scale. The relatively small number of hosts per zone is not really surprising: things are probably dominated by a large number of zones with only a very small amount of hosts. To give some insight in this matter: as per version 980108, the host utility will (in its final summary) classify the encountered zones in 5 categories depending on the number of hosts therein: empty (0), small (1-10), medium (10-100), large (100-1000), and huge (1000 or more). This may confirm the conclusion (which we already know for some time, of course): A domain name is much more important than an IP address. Now we're at it: as the host utility is doing its monthly job, it could easily accumulate other sorts of statistics as well. So if you have suggestions for additional interesting figures, just let me know. -- Eric Wassenaar TLD ZONES HOSTS HOSTS/ZONE dk 36717 169368 4 cz 7548 56869 7 tr 4405 35027 7 at 13216 108473 8 ch 23390 189175 8 pt 4761 42447 8 ie 3910 39864 10 it 23673 254296 10 pl 8221 88454 10 ALL 416339 5789853 13 de 81425 1132174 13 ru 8079 108590 13 uk 75841 1017452 13 be 7572 106808 14 nl 26126 391228 14 se 22903 348609 15 hu 3427 67887 19 il 4448 86761 19 no 13998 292382 20 fr 14509 355031 24 es 7571 196403 25 fi 7076 486811 68 [] host -V Version 980108 [] host -HS -L 999 fo. ... Encountered 289 hosts in 82 zones within fo Encountered 7 duplicate hosts in 82 zones within fo Transferred 82 zones out of 84 attempts Processed 82 zones out of 85 requests Classified 47/82 empty zones (0/289 hosts) within fo Classified 31/82 small zones (48/289 hosts) within fo Classified 3/82 medium zones (70/289 hosts) within fo Classified 1/82 large zone (171/289 hosts) within fo

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Re: meeting?
by Mike Norris 09 Jan '98

09 Jan '98

Register now, Geza, with the option to pay later. There is no surcharge provided you're **registered** before 18th Jan. That's the way I read it and I trust the NCC agree ;-) See you there. Mike ---------- > From: Turchanyi Geza <turchanyi.geza(a)MATAV.HU> > To: 'ripe-list(a)ripe.net' > Subject: meeting? > Date: 09 January 1998 12:39 > > Dear All, > > I do not know how many of us are in similar situation as me, however > I have some bad feeling. Something definitely goes in a wrong direction. > > The RIPE meetings used to be a combination of festivity and work. > > Then many things changed. Some of them had to, unfortunately, some of > them probably should not. > > Yesterday I was able to check on-line the list of attendees already registered > and this is a positive sign: the process is well robotized. > > However, there were only 81 people on the list, 33 amongst > them from the RIPE NCC, that is roughly 40 percent. And we have only ten > days left to avoid the punishment of the extra 50 ECU registration fee increase. > > What I should have to pay anyhow, if I would be able to persuade my boss(es) > to sign my travel form without presenting them a complete meeting plan, as I > do not have credit card, and check and banktransfer is not accepted, and > on-site paying penalized. > > > Well, something should not be robotized, I guess. > > Hope to see you sometimes, somewhere, > > Geza Turchanyi > > > > > [40;1H[K

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