On Thursday, February 15, 1996 3:17 AM, Hugh Ferguson[SMTP:hugh@FundSERV.COM] wrote:
>On Thu, 15 Feb 1996, Sean Davies wrote:
>
>> On an auto mailing list, whats to stop someone subscribing the list to itself ?
>> Thus causing the whole list to disappear into a puff of green logic ?
>>
>> Is the only answer to make the list closed ?
>> In which case, I pity the poor approver !!
>
[...]
>You might want to also make sure that the list alias is something more
>obscure than mylist-users.
That doesn't really help, because there are people out there who use
scripts that search out all of the mailing lists on a system and use
that information to forge subscribes; Bill Gates & Steve Case are
popular victims for this ploy. That's why all my lists are closed.
If I see someone who tries to subscribe to all of my lists at once,
I just dump the admin requests. This also screens out most spamming
attacks, too (like the Russian e-mail bride scam, for example).
That particular attack caused me a bit of trouble, because one of the
lists it hit was mostly dormant (it was for a monthly newsletter),
and two subscribers had abandoned their GEnie accounts without
unsubscribing from the list first. GEnie's automailer sent two error
messages which announced that those people were no longer GEnie members; unfortunately, it automailed it to the list and not the list-owner
address. This caused double the number of GEnie error messages to hit my
list. Again and again. Some people got over a hundred and fifty copies
before I managed to stop it by manually unsubscribing the two ex-GEnie
members.
That's when I closed down open subscribes and open posting on all of my
lists.
--
\ | Earl Cooley III * shiva@io.com * <url:http://www.io.com/~shiva/> | /
\| Online Liaison, the 55th Worldcon: LoneStarCon 2, Aug 28-Sep 1, 1997 |/
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