[Mailman-Users] a question about unadvertised lists and spam

[Brad Knowles]

On 5/29/07, Dennis Morgan wrote:

>  My question is - are spamers able to pick up lists from the default (but
>  not easily accessible) default mailman listinfo page and start
>  bombarding us with spam on all lists?

Yes.

>                                         Or should I set the "Advertise
>  this list" option to "no" for the lists on the default listinfo page?

That would be your choice.  But anything that is publicly accessible 
is game for being snarfed by spammers.

There are tools that use this fact to their advantage against 
spammers, by creating bogus e-mail addresses as part of a "honeypot" 
campaign, where they know that each address they generate is unique 
and they know all the details of which IP address was scanning their 
system at what time when they generated that address, and if anyone 
ever tries to send anything to that address not only are they 
automatically blacklisted but so is the IP address that did the 
original scan, and so on.

However, this doesn't help you if you're just trying to run some 
mailing lists for your customers or your community.

-- 
Brad Knowles <brad at shub-internet.org>, Consultant & Author
LinkedIn Profile: <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu>
Slides from Invited Talks: <http://tinyurl.com/tj6q4>

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