[Mailman-Users] Help with abusive user...

[Trent Fisher]

I have a big problem, and I am hoping someone here has some advice... I have a person on my mailing list who has been very abusive, but has recently taken a turn to the creepy (I would call it cyberstalking), and so I have been trying to eject him from the list.

First, I set his address to "moderate".  He promptly resubscribes with a new email address and continues where he left off.  We did a couple iterations of that.

Then I set new subscribers to be moderated by default.  Then after a pause of a week or so, he starts posting again.  But he cannot as only members may post to the list.  Looking at the email headers it is clear that he must be forging the email messages to look, to the casual observer, like they are going through the mailing list, but his messages lack the proper "Reply-To" and all the "List-*" headers... but he is somehow "on" the mailing list to be getting the messages to respond to.

So, I set all recent subscribers to "nomail", under the assumption one of them is him.  But his posts (that is, replys to mailing list messages) continue.  So he still has an address on the list, but I cannot figure out which one.

Here's something weird: someone subscribed a week or so ago, but I cannot find them on the web interface.  I get both subscribe and unsubscribe notifications, so I know he didn't unsubscribe.  Could this guy be exploiting a bug?

One thought I had, was to write a script to send out a specially constructed message to each individual on the list.  The message would be "forged" to look like it came from the list, and each message would have a slight variation which I can map back to the email address that got the message.  Then I could know which address is his.  This seems like a lot of work and it may not even work.  But it's the only thought I've got at this point short of shutting the list down.

I have thought about contacting his ISP (Comcast) and seeing if they could help... but I am reluctant to do this as he seems to have no end of energy and can carry a grudge to the end of the earth... and, I have heard that he is a lawyer!  So, I have a feeling that would be a very rocky, and ultimately futile, road to go down.

Anyway, if anybody has any advice for how to deal with this, or any ideas, I would be ever so grateful!

++thanks,
trent...