THE LATEST version of Sendmail, the popular Internet e-mail routing and hosting software, will support IPv6, an upgrade to the IP that is being pushed by many in the Internet engineering community. IPv6 advocates say Sendmail is the first e-mail application ported to the controversial IPv6 standard.

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"Sendmail supporting IPv6 is the first required application, after the basic network applications [such as Telnet and FTP], that users can use IPv6 for as they begin their deployment of IPv6 in the market," said Jim Bound, co-chair of the IPv6 Forum's Technical Directorate and a principal member of the technical staff at Compaq.

Officials at Sendmail, the company that oversees development of the open source Sendmail software, will announce next week that Version 8.10 supports IPv6. The latest version, already tested by 4,500 beta users, has 130 new features including IPv6 support.

Developed in 1981 by researcher Eric Allman, Sendmail is used on 75 percent of the world's Internet e-mail servers. Allman formed Sendmail in 1998 to provide souped-up versions of the free Sendmail software to commercial customers. Sendmail offers two commercial packages for e-mail routing and hosting (or storage): Sendmail Pro for Unix environments and Sendmail NT for Windows NT environments.

Under development for seven years, IPv6 is designed to solve the problem of a shortage of Internet addresses available with the current version of the IP, IPv4. IPv6 replaces the 32-bit addressing scheme in IPv4 with 128-bit addressing, which allows for a virtually unlimited number of computers to be connected directly to the Internet. The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) has finished the IPv6 standards, but few compliant products are available and only a handful of end-users have adopted it.

Leaders of the IETF are pleased to hear that Sendmail will support IPv6 and hope it will encourage end users to migrate to IPv6.

"We need many [applications] converted and are always happy when it happens," said Bob Fink, co-chair of the IETF's IPv6 transition working group and network development scientist with the Energy Sciences Network at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. "As so much code derives from Sendmail, it is probably a bigger deal than most run-of-the-mill [applications] being converted."

Sendmail Inc., in Emeryville, Calif., is at www.sendmail.com.

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