How to stop mail-bombers from abusing web subscribe page

Hi all, We have discovered "mail bomber" programs like "boom mail" abusing the web "subscribe" feature of Mailman 2.1.15 to send hundreds of subscription confirmation messages to addresses that then complain to us and report us as spammers. Is there a canonical way to deal with this? The ones we see look like this in our web logs: 104.154.46.32 nmap.org - [29/Jun/2015:15:03:03 +0000] "GET /mailman/subscribe/announce?email=ALLCAPS.EMAIL@EXAMPLE.COM&fullname=&pw=123456789&pw-conf=123456789&language=en&digest=0&email-button=Subscribe HTTP/1.1" 504 323 "http://ugbox.club/boommail_bachdev/" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; Trident/7.0; rv:11.0) like Gecko" We ended up using this config in Apache: <Location /mailman/subscribe> # Stop spammers from sending tons of GET requests to mail-bomb victims with subscription confirmations <LimitExcept POST> Deny from All </LimitExcept> # Those spammers never set referer correctly, either RewriteEngine On RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST}@@%{HTTP_REFERER} !^([^@]*)@@https?://\1/.* RewriteRule .* [NC,F] </Location> We'd love to hear if there's a better way to do this. Dan

On 7/16/15 11:42 AM, Daniel Miller wrote:
Upgrade to Mailman 2.1.16 or later and enable the SUBSCRIBE_FORM_SECRET feature.
-- Mark Sapiro <mark@msapiro.net> The highway is for gamblers, San Francisco Bay Area, California better use your sense - B. Dylan

On 7/16/15 11:42 AM, Daniel Miller wrote:
Upgrade to Mailman 2.1.16 or later and enable the SUBSCRIBE_FORM_SECRET feature.
-- Mark Sapiro <mark@msapiro.net> The highway is for gamblers, San Francisco Bay Area, California better use your sense - B. Dylan
participants (2)
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Daniel Miller
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Mark Sapiro