[Mailman-developers] what to do with confirmation of web based subscriptions

[Ken Manheimer]

On Thu, 23 Apr 1998, Scott wrote:

> On Thu, Apr 23, 1998 at 07:10:05PM -0400, Ken Manheimer wrote:
> | Hi, all.  I'm finally getting my head back to the surface after
> | returning, and starting to catch up on some of the mailman comments and
> | developments.  I also have some new items of my own to throw in the mix. 
> 
> great! what have you been working on?

Just some small things - a fix to the admin option help mechanism (and
displaying the current option setting like on the regular options page -
instead of 0/1/2 values for enumerations, you see the setting names on 
radio button with the right one checked - trivial, i know, but much more
civilized...)  I've forgotten what else - nothing big, but i'm starting
to get a feel for some of the big pending things.

> this practice, believe it or not, is quite common at our site. every
> day somone picks a victim's address and subscribes them to each of the
> 80-100 lists at our site with open subscription policies. that victim
> then essentially gets mailbombed in a real bad sortof way.  i'd like
> it if mailman made this impossible. i think listserv makes this
> impossible by requiring all subscription requests to undergo a
> confirmation request. 

Yikes.  I'm convinced.
> | Along related lines, it does occur to me that we should prevent mail
> | loops, where either the list is subscribed to itself, or where some
> | reflector loops back to the list.  (The former situation was hinted at
> | this afternoon, when someone accidentally specified the matrix-sig as
> | their address for subscription *to* matrix-sig list; all it did was post
> | the subscription instructions to the list, but it would have subscribed
> | the list to itself if there was no confirmation...)  What i'm doing is
> | adding a header, "X-BeenThere: <listaddr>", which will be detected and
> | cause a hold of the message for approval, if encountered.
> 
> that sounds like a good idea.  

More later.

Ken