L-Soft recently announced the launch of the LISTSERV^® Maestro hosting service, which provides customers all of the comprehensive features of LISTSERV^® Maestro for managing and tracking e-mail marketing campaigns but without the software and hardware investments. With more than six years of experience providing hosting solutions to companies such as AT&T, Microsoft and CNN, L-Soft offers clients reliability and security through the use of redundant hardware and regularly updated anti-virus protection.

Q. How can LISTSERV® help me handle out-of-office responses? Answer by Dana Burnett Customer Support Engineer, L-Soft LISTSERV® version 1.8e introduced a new feature called a "Content Filter." This feature is primarily intended to filter out-of-office messages. It is activated by creating a mail template. The CONTENT_FILTER mail template form, if present, contains filtering rules, with one rule per line (empty lines are ignored). You can create the template using the Web interface or by sending the following command to your LISTSERV® command address: PUT LISTNAME MAILTPL PW=XXXXX >>> Content_Filter Subject: Out of Office Action: DISCARD Subject: Out of the Office Action: DISCARD Replace (LISTNAME) with your list name, replace XXXXX with your password, and put the actual filter information after Subject and Action. The default is Action: REJECT with no specified reason. REJECT means that the message is rejected. ALLOW means that the message is allowed and all remaining rules are ignored. DISCARD is a better choice for out-of-office messages since the message is dropped immediately with no further processing. No rejection message is sent that could cause a loop with the out-of-office messages. More information about the Content Filter is available in the LISTSERV® Site Manager's Manual. To submit questions for future issues of the newsletter, please contact editor@lsoft.com.

L-Soft interviews Pete Weiss, Senior Systems Engineer, Office of Administrative Systems, Penn State University.

"I must say that LISTSERV® is among the most stable and troublefree of the heavily used software packages we run here. It is well worth every penny. And you can quote me!" Frederick D. Ullman, Ph.D., Director of Computing Services, SUNY College at Fredonia

For more information or a customized quote, please contact sales@lsoft.com.

As the e-mail marketing industry continues to grow, more and more vendors will offer products and services to satisfy the demand. But, as we have seen during the last few years, technology companies can disappear just as quickly as they entered the arena. How then can you be certain that your investment in e-mail marketing software and services will be sound? Here are a few key questions to answer before you decide to purchase an e-mail marketing solution.

The new version of F-Secure Anti-Virus has been released, and installation kits are now available on L-Soft's Web site. It is recommended that customers upgrade to version 5.40 (Windows) and 4.15 (Linux). L-Soft highly recommends the upgrade, which will enable increased virus protection for customers. Please contact your sales representative for a new license activation key.

L-Soft invites you to learn more about our software solutions by taking advantage of our product training seminars. These sessions feature the newest releases of our LISTSERV^® Maestro, LISTSERV^® and LSMTP^® software products.

Training seminars are designed to provide an in-depth understanding of L-Soft's products and guidance on optimal performance strategies. The seminars will be held at our Landover, MD, office in February, May, August and October of 2003. L-Soft also offers custom on-site training, where our technical instructors travel to a location of a customer's choice.

If you sign up for one of our 2003 Landover training seminars before January 24, 2003, we will give you a 15 percent discount off the price. In addition, the more classes that you attend, the higher the discount.

Bell Canada provides a range of communications services, including local and long-distance telephony, Internet access and high-speed data services to 12.6 million customers in Ontario and Quebec. The company has been using LISTSERV^® and LSMTP^® since 1998 to send e-mail reminders for billing purposes. The list now has more than 300,000 subscribers.

To browse more client success stories, visit L-Soft's case study page. If you or your company would like to be featured as an L-Soft success story, please contact editor@lsoft.com.

eMarketing Association January 15, 2003, in Beverly Hills, CA L-Soft Vice President of Marketing Gabriela Linares will give a keynote address, "E-mail Marketing, the Marketing Tool You Can't Afford to Ignore." View her presentation titled, "Advanced E-Mail Marketing Strategies," from the previous eMarketing Association event. L-Soft CEO Eric Thomas gave a keynote presentation on "The Evolution of E-mail" at "IP dagarna" in Stockholm, Sweden, on November 19, 2002. Internet World Spring 2003 April 15-17, 2003, in San Jose, CA.

Direct Magazine: "Live From NCDM: Lifetime Builds Loyalty With Newsletters" DMNews.com: "Lifetime Sees Success From Breast Cancer Awareness E-Mail Program"

If there is a topic that you would like to see addressed in a future issue, please contact editor@lsoft.com.