Software Program Cooks Spam

Computer users tired of a steady diet of "spam," take heart: Internet service providers are getting new tools to block junk email peddling everything from pornography to get-rich-quick schemes.

The author of Sendmail, the electronic post office program used on about 75 percent of the computers that route email to its recipients, Tuesday announced anti-spam additions to the latest version of the software.

Spam named after a Monty Python skit involving a diner menu of "Spam, Spam, Spam, bacon, eggs and Spam" accounts for an estimated 10 percent of all email worldwide, clogging recipients' in boxes and slowing routing computers.

The issue has pitted computer users, privacy rights activists and Internet service providers against companies that spit out millions of advertisements a day.

Most spammers conceal their own email addresses, making it hard for computer users to retaliate. The new version of Sendmail, however, will verify return addresses by looking them up on a central Internet registry before relaying the email.

Sendmail author Eric Allman said the new version also has the ability to reject mail from known junk mail originators by checking a widely circulated list of spammers, called the Realtime Blackhole List.

Allman said he would continue to offer Sendmail as freeware, meaning it is available for free on the Internet.

Randall Winchester, a computer systems administrator at the University of Maryland at College Park who helped Allman test the new tools, said the new software deflects thousands of email messages an hour from the university's more than 40,000 student email accounts.

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