[Mailman-Users] Feature Request: Selective Mass Subscription

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Brad Knowles writes:

 > I know there are people who use it responsibly, which is why I
 > don't advocate too strongly for its removal.  But that doesn't mean
 > that it doesn't get abused, or that we shouldn't do things to try
 > to curb that abuse.

I have to disagree.  Anything that can be done with the Mailman "mass
subscribe" feature can be done just as effectively with a contact list
on Gmail, in theory.[1]  It's other aspects of Gmail policy that (so
far at least) make that a small enough problem that I've never
considered filtering on "^(From|Sender):.*@gmail\.com".

So I think that's the wrong way to phrase it.  We (the Mailman
community) can't do much to curb abuse without crippling useful
features of the software.  What we can do is to provide hosting
services with tools to implement their own policies.  What needs to be
done is to give site administrators ways to set policy.  *Maybe* the
defaults should be set up "safely", too, but that's not entirely clear
to me.


Footnotes: 
[1]  And in practice.  Last term I gave a makeup exam to a student who
fell prey to a hoax that classes were being cancelled in solidarity
with a planned strike by university service workers -- on the day of
my midterm.  The (confirmed by Google, apparently) source was a
throwaway Gmail address.  One thing I'll say for the spammer: the
English was excellent and a dead ringer for university bureaucratese.