[Mailman-Developers] Re: feature reminder: no unsubscribe (Christopher Kolar)

[Thomas Wouters]

On Fri, Apr 21, 2000 at 02:01:33PM -0400, Ken Manheimer wrote:

[ restricted unsubscribes ]

> My apologies if this has already been hashed out to everyone's
> satisfaction, but i would be nervous about how this particular feature
> would be subject to abuse.

> I suppose, on the one hand, that spammers and the like could just use
> something else - bare mailling list aliases, for that matter - to get
> their captive audiences.  On the other hand, i wouldn't want mailman to be
> the tool of choice for capturing audiences.  Might notifications of
> deenlistment, with the ease of forcing reenlistment, be sufficient?

Not in my case, and probably not in most cases that warrant restricted
unsubscriptions. I thought about this for a bit too, back when I wrote it (i
need it for myself in any case, but I was wondering wether to allow it for
other list admins)

Either these 'spammers' run mailman themselves, or they run the list on
someone elses' mailman install. Wether or not to allow restricted
unsubscribing would be a global mailman setting, like 'open subscribe'
currently -- the mailman admin has to explicitly enable it. If the mailman
administrator does enable it, it's his responsibility to make sure it
doesn't get abused. (When complaints come in, and the list admins refuse to
handle these properly, simply turn the option off, or turn the list off, or
whatever.)

If these spammers themselves run mailman, they can first of all add it
themselves, and they would probably have to hack mailman anyway, to be
usuable for spamming: my patch does nothing about the options page, and it
is still possible to 'mute' the list, or turn on digest, and that kind of
thing. (And I have no intention of disabling that. people sometimes do wish
to turn off the list, temporarily, when they go on vacation, for instance.)

-- 
Thomas Wouters <thomas@xs4all.net>

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