And, self-followup, I had looked on list.org before, but hadn't checked the archives, so seems clear that the behavior is common. Running the RHEL5 Mailman currently (2.1.9) so still don't have the SUBSCRIBE_FORM_SECRET feature yet.

Mostly curious about the motivation behind this - what do these bots do if / when they are actually able to confirm or get confirmed?

w

ps - Here are a couple of quick throwaway 'withlist' scripts I threw together to add a regexp matching the spammers' email addresses, and to purge pending subscription requests matching a similar regexp. Posting here in case someone finds them useful for this, or some other, purpose.

% cat purge_requests.py # quick "withlist" script. # call via withlist -r purge_requests LISTNAME # or via loop: # for LIST in ./list_lists -b ; do ./withlist -r purge_requests $LIST ; done

import re from Mailman import mm_cfg from Mailman.mm_cfg import DISCARD

email_re = re.compile('^(foo|bar.baz|blah)\+[0-9]+@example\.com')

def purge_requests(m): print "** Checking %s" % m.internal_name() m.Lock() for item in m.GetSubscriptionIds(): email_addr = m.GetRecord(item)[1] if email_re.match(email_addr): print ">> Discarding %s from %s" % (email_addr, m.internal_name()) m.HandleRequest(item, DISCARD) m.Save() m.Unlock()

% cat set_banlist.py # quick "withlist" script. # call via withlist -r set_banlist LISTNAME # or via loop: # for LIST in ./list_lists -b ; do ./withlist -r set_banlist $LIST ; done

# Obviously, the problem becomes a bit more complex if we want to adjust # the existing rule, vs. adding a new one; then we'd have to track the # item # within the list, and modify that item (this also shouldn't be # too hard).

from Mailman import mm_cfg

# This will append the item below to the ban_list for $LISTNAME # Note additional pattern below; that's just a check to see if the # pattern already exists. ban_item = '^(foo|bar.baz|blah)\\+[0-9]+@example\.com'

def set_banlist(m): # Rather than use regex, use this to see if substring is in list if not rule_exists(m.ban_list): print "**** Updating %s" % m.internal_name() m.Lock() m.ban_list.append(ban_item) m.Save()

# Could probably do this a little more tersely with 'lambda' def rule_exists(list): for item in list: if '\(foo' in item: return 1

On 08/25/2015 10:12 AM, Will Yardley wrote:

I'm seeing massive numbers of subscription lists to various lists we host (including multiple requests to the same list).

These are submitted via a distributed network of hosts, presumably botnet victims / open proxies.

The requests are from foo+[0-9]{9}@gmail.com

We have seen a huge rash of these on the python.org lists. Even with a SUBSCRIBE_FORM_SECRET set and SUBSCRIBE_FORM_MIN_TIME = seconds(8) a small percentage succeeded and that was still a lot.

Because of this, the head of the 2.1 branch at https://launchpad.net/mailman/2.1/ now implements a GLOBAL_BAN_LIST and on mail.python.org, that is set to

GLOBAL_BAN_LIST = ['^.*\+\d{3,}@']

to ban any address whose local part ends with a '+' followed by 3 or more digits. Before doing this I checked and there was only one member of one list out of all the python.org list subscribers that had a local part ending with '+' and digits and it only had one digit between the '+' and '@'.

The attempts keep coming though.

-- Mark Sapiro mark@msapiro.net The highway is for gamblers, San Francisco Bay Area, California better use your sense - B. Dylan