hosts.allow and hosts.deny problem

[Aaron Borowski <a-borowski-11 alumni uchicago edu>]

Please help, I'm using Redhat 8.0 with all the current updates as of 
up2date. About a month or so ago I noticed that my hosts.allow and 
hosts.deny files have stopped working, i.e. I cannot dissallow certain 
traffic. I have made no changes to either of this files for at least 6 
months. What's going on? Recently, on another note, I've also had a 
problem using Mozilla to check my email on a remote client that only 
allows SSL connections on port 995. It will not log in.

Any help you all could offer would be much appreciated, Thanx.