Re: pacifica free internet digest #3

From: eugene.leitl@lrz.uni-muenchen.de
Date: Sat May 13 2000 - 14:15:52 MDT


From: Oliver Xymoron <oxymoron@waste.org>

> From: Brett Ellington Steiger III (He's baaaack) <rali@Tifosi.com>
> Subject: Re: [ST] advertising: threat or menace?
> Date: Tue, 9 May 2000 14:12:24 -0400 (EDT)
>
> Heather Madrone said:
>
> <> >lists, new ones come right in. I can do a lot with majordomo's
> <> >taboo_(body|header) but not block subscriptions ....
> <>
> <> You *can* block subscription requests (by setting the list
> <> to closed), but then you have to hand-approve all subscription
> <> requests.
>
> You can do an absolute block in the way you suggest, sure, but there
> is no way to filter specific addresses or domains such as remarq.
>
> Manual approval, or even procmail assisted manual approval, is an
> enormous PitA when the lists get big enough. I am or have run
> several lists with multiple thousands of subscribers. The daily
> churn on a list like that moves it well beyond where you wanna
> administer it w/o tools.
>
> If one follows the procmail assisted manual approval route, you
> still loose the "confirmation cookie" feature, which is too
> valuable to forgo. (300-400 message/day lists can make effective
> mail bombing "tools" so it's important that the person who
> subscribes acknowledges that she really wants the list ...)
>
> I wish I could do selective subscription filtering inside MD, but
> until/unless that happens, the "whack em as soon as they subscribe"
> method solves my problems.
>
> [It also lulls the remarq people into a false sense of having
> gotten onto your list, I imagine. ---pozzo]

I have a Majordomo hack which allows global bans for subscribe and post.
It has a config file that has lines of the form:

command:list:address

where each part is a regular expression. Oh, and there's an invert option.
Bans get processed the same way as other admin bounces. This was about a
half-hour hack and works quite well. Pester me for it and I'll go to the
trouble of making an actual patch out of.

I have another patch that's been on my homepage for a few years that does
secure subscription confirmation (the one that's part of recent Majordomo
is broken). This has worked quite well to fool automated list subscribers
and spammers so I've never actually had to put them on the ban list.

--
 "Love the dolphins," she advised him. "Write by W.A.S.T.E.." 



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