At 02:32 PM 2003-01-07 -0800, Mark Giorgi wrote:
>Everywhere that I've run into Majordomo in use,
>Majordomo is set to confirm each subscription
>request by requiring the would-be subscriber to
>respond to an automated subscription-confirmation
>email.
>
>Can this feature be turned off by the Majordomo
>administrator, thereby allowing people to be added
>directly to a list, without having to respond
>to a confirmation request?
Yes, but only someone who was primarily an Internet vandal would do that.
At one point, it was common practice. The earliest versions of Majordomo
did not even have confirmation as an option.
You have to understand that the main reason that the current system of
validating subscriptions was undertaken because people developed tools such
as "upyours" which would sign people up for hundreds of mailing lists. The
tools knew how to interact with majordomo and listserv, and so forth, and
would actually query sites to determine what lists they had, and then they
would sign the victims up for hundreds of mailing lists, rendering their
e-mail accounts unusable.
Systems that would simply filter or bounce the mail were unknown, because
mail was looked at as something that individual people sent to others (or
that you got from mailing lists that you wanted to read). The main point
was to make it reliable. Filters, which would, perforce, make it less
reliable, were, by and large eschewed.
However, these days, running unverified lists is considered to be the
hallmark of someone being a spammer. Since anyone can sign someone up for
one of these lists, and people frequently do, the usual answer is, "Someone
must have signed you up." to the "How did I get on this list?" query from
the victim.
Whether the site manager signed up everyone they found in a web search of
the world based on a subject, or whether one of your friends really signed
you up, well, that answer usually goes unknown.
In the anti-spam community, the answer is pretty cut and dried: You run
unverified mailing lists, you are a spammer. Pure and simple. What
started out as a tool to defend innocent third parties from Internet
vandals has become an anti-spam tool.
If you do start running unverified mailing lists, you can easily get listed
on such as the RBL and so forth. The simple answer is, "Don't do it. It
seems like a good idea, but it is a really stupid thing to do, unless you
are a spammer."
--
If you doubt that magnet therapy works, I put to you this observation: When
refrigerators were first invented, in the 1940s, they were rather
unreliable, but then they became significantly more reliable. The basic
design of the refrigerator did not change, and we all know that quality was
important back then, so I doubt that newer refrigerators are made better.
Refrigerators have become more reliable because of the rise of the
refrigerator magnet.
Nick Simicich - njs@scifi.squawk.com
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