[Mailman-Users] Subscription flood

Bill Christensen billc_lists at greenbuilder.com
Thu May 8 18:31:14 CEST 2014


Hi all,

I've got a problem with one of my lists where it's being flooded with 
spurious subscription requests.

The list was set to require subscription confirmation; the innocent 
victims whose addresses were used for the subscription requests started 
complaining, as they'd get anywhere from 2 to 400 (!) confirmation 
requests in a day from a list they'd never even heard of.

About 12 hrs ago I switched it to require Admin approval.  500+ 
subscription requests - mostly in batches of 5-10 from the same address 
- have come through since then.

I attempted requiring both confirmation and admin approval, but the 
order of operations is that the admin isn't asked to approve until a 
confirmation comes through.  That's no help to the victims receiving the 
confirm requests.

Question 1: Is it possible to reverse the order of approval and 
confirmation when requiring both?  The admin then can reject all those 
with duplicates, only allowing the (presumably real) single subscription 
requests to send out a confirmation request.

If so, how would that be done?

Question 2: Any other suggestions on how to handle this?

Currently running mailman 2.1.13_0 (Next stop is to MacPorts list to see 
if the maintainer will update the port to the latest version)


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