The esteemed Brad Knowles has said: > > Personally, I would be happy to see the "mass subscribe" feature go away > completely from the web interface of Mailman, or at least disabled by > default. But then I've been fighting spam since the time I was the Sr. > Internet Mail Administrator at AOL in '95, and this is a subject that I feel > very strongly about. > I am going to go on record as very strongly OPPOSED to removal of the "mass subscribe" feature. We used it as the only method a new user can subscribe to the list.
Our method for new subscribers is to direct them to a web page with a form they fill out. On completion, that form is mailed by a cgi script to the moderators. After moderator review, we manually add those we approve to Mailman through the "mass subscribe" interface. The two mail subscription ports (-join, -subscribe) are disabled. Some time ago I did a check to see how much spam and how many bogus attempts to subscribe those ports got. Answer: plenty, and it was quite clear that there were several attempts to evade our checks by listers we had removed for list violations. I don't know what you did at AOL, but I'm here to tell you that AOL in general was one big headache right from the get-go, and the source of many disguised attempts to thwart our subscription policies. We're down to two AOL subscribers who are very well known to the moderators. Hank ------------------------------------------------------ Mailman-Users mailing list Mailman-Users@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-users Mailman FAQ: http://wiki.list.org/x/AgA3 Searchable Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-users%40python.org/ Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/mailman-users/archive%40jab.org Security Policy: http://wiki.list.org/x/QIA9
