The Clout Project is the email project of the non-profit organization UniForum Chicago. Until recently, it sponsored a distributed multi-node virtual machine that not only provided name and routing services, but actually spooled and delivered mail for client machines.
The reason we provided this service, gratis, was that there was no affordable alternative for small organizations or individuals; services providers charged fees for services that were beyond the means of most such candidates.
The Clout Project filled that gap. Recently, however, multiple Internet providers have begun offering service in the Chicago metropolitan area. Providing good physical coverage and rates for mail delivery and other Internet-related services that would have been impossible only a year or two ago, these providers have effectively made the necessity for the Clout project to deliver Email obsolete. This is good; it is the kind of evolution for which we strove, and we're very glad to see that our interim service was able to carry us through until such alternatives were available.
We still have work to do, however. The Clout Project has a strong mandate to support and encourage the use of Internet-style domainist addressing (RFC 822), and does this through participation in the .us domain project. The .us domain is a fully official Internet domain specifically intended to provide a place for people whose machines might not quite fit in one of the other top level Internet domains. RFC 1480 describes the rules governing use of the .us domain.
Clout machines are the primary domain name servers for the batavia.il.us, chicago.il.us and chi.il.us sub-domains of the .us domain. There are currently several other DNS servers on other Networks and at other locations that are updated regularly from the primaries.
What this means is, you can contact us and we will register your machine in one of the .il.us domains so that the rest of the Internet-aware world can find it.
Please note that new registrations in the chi.il.us domain were closed 1/1/97 in favor of the chicago.il.us domain. Existing chi.il.us domain will be maintained, all existing names in the chi.il.us domain are reserved in the chicago.il.us domain and users wishing to convert from chi.il.us to chicago.il.us should contact us.We also maintain a list of machines that will forward Electronic Mail via UUCP or SLIP/PPP and Doug Blair posts this list quite regularly to the Usenet newsgroup chi.mail.
The Clout Project is currently investigating other Email and Internet related services that will be supported in the future.
While we are a project of UniForum Chicago which is in turn the Chicago area chapter of UniForum, you don't have to be a member of either to make use of The Clout Project. However, we encourage membership in UniForum Chicago. It's inexpensive, and provides the funds we need to continue to offer such services to the community. Some other services and benefits of Uniforum Chicago do require membership, and are well worthwhile.
For more details on Uniforum Chicago, please contact mep@xnet.com.
The .us domain is a formal Internet domain, recognized throughout the world. The recent release of RFC 1480 "The US Domain" has revised the members of the .us domain to include primary schools, secondary schools, City governments and State governments.
A requirement of RFC 1480 is that your mail software have valid Internet-style addresses in the "From:" or "Return-Path" fields of the header of the messages that you send out. This may mean that you will have to modify your sendmail configuration file, if that is what you are using under UNIX, or configure your mail software to do the above.
Administrators of The Clout Project are able to advise you concerning software acquisition, configuration, etc.
The .us domain was intended primarily as a catch-all for the people who might not quite fit into one of the other domains. This usually means people's personal machines. However with the June 1993 revision of RFC 1480 there is no longer a restriction of how many machines can be registered in the .us domain. This opens the door for small businesses and organizations with multiple machines.
The Clout Project is the primary authority for the batavia.il.us, chicago.il.us and chi.il.us , (though we do provide DNS name service to sites in other domains), and is fully responsible for administration of these subdomains of the .us domain.
If you currently have e-mail access you can drop a note to: postmaster@clout.chicago.il.us
The contact person monitoring that address will then put you in touch with one of the clout administrators who can answer your questions and set you up. If you don't have e-mail access (and that's why you want to get in touch with us), you have a few options: First, you can call one of the administrators (or the current postmaster of clout.chicago.il.us); some phone numbers are listed at the end of this document. Shortly, you will be able to submit your registration online using your Web broswer.
If you are planning on using a forwarding site not in the .chicago.il.us domain please include the Email address of the technical contact of that site so that we can verify that it is ok for your mail to flow through that site. Some of the Internet forwarding providers will then contact us for you in order to set up the name service records.
While the Clout project cannot endorse any Internet Service Providers, we can make available to you a comprehensive list of such providers in the Chicago metropolitan area. This will let you know who the providers are, what services they offer, and how to contact them for rate information.
The Clout Project wishes to thank Xnet Communications for providing network access to our primary and secondary nameservers.
For questions or comments on this Web Page, please send mail to: webmaster@www.clout.chicago.il.us