I started seeing these as well, in pretty large quantities just recently. I wasn't seeing spam notices, but an increase in my deferred mail queue (Postfix) from emails that couldn't be delivered. Looking in my Mailman logs, I had hundreds of subscription/signup requests without any subsequent confirmations, and they were coming in once a minute or so from bots.
I had added 'SUBSCRIBE_FORM_SECRET' with a key some time ago, but that seemed to have stopped working as effectively. Implementing the google captcha solution to Mailman a week or so ago stopped it dead. For now...
Quoting Jim Dory (james@dorydesign.com):
I've got a new problem with my mailing list. I run a local announcements/trade list that should be of no interest to non-locals.
I started seeing warnings from Yahoo about users marking messages as spam.. (I'm subscribed to Yahoo's Antispam Feedback. I never got other feedback loops from others - like Microsoft - to work). The messages that were being marked as spam by users were the confirmation emails sent by mailman to confirm a signup. To avoid having Yahoo shut down the list as spam (for its subscribers), I set the subscription to be approved by admin, so I could review who was trying to sign up.
More and more now I'm seeing what appears to be spammers trying to subscribe, but I can't be sure. I'm seeing emails like:
hirofeet0916@yahoo.co.jp (doesn't seem local) blvckpvlm@gmail.com (not many use user names such as that) fsafwcasgsadf2@gwqc.com (obviously not real - couldn't find domain with minimal searching)
Plus some that could be local but how would I know.
I could take off the "approval by admin" for subscription and just deal with anyone that is a problem afterward, but I do worry that they may be harvesting emails from subscribers, which are available in the reply-to headers.
Don't know if there's anything I can do. Anyone else dealing with this?
thanks. Jim
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