[Mailman-Developers] Absentee list owners become suicide mail-bombers

[Barry Warsaw]

On Mon, 2003-08-18 at 10:51, John A. Martin wrote:
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> What defenses does Mailman have against suicide mail-bomber attacks?
> 
> The suicide mail-bomber has a number of list-owner addresses for which
> the receiving MTAs take delivery and subsequently send a "Mail
> Delivery Warning" mail message back to the list admin address which,
> of course, Mailman sends on to the list owner addresses and so forth.
> 
> Pretty picture, no?

Indeed, but things are better for MM2.1.  There, all bounces to -owner
addresses are directed to the site list's -bounces address, while the
site list -owner is directed to the loop-killer alias.

> Would it not be a good idea to rate-limit mail messages from the list
> admin address to the list-owner address(es)?  And eventually, to block
> incoming admin mail?

It's an interesting idea.  In my MM3 model, I want to unify normal list
rosters and admin rosters, such that we can do similar bounce processing
and registrations on admin addresses (not to mention archiving -owner
email!).  Then it would be a small step to notify the site admins when
all -owners have been bounce disabled, and perhaps to do more
sophisticated actions such as disable/auto-reject all list traffic).

> Another problem I see frequently with absentee/negligent list owners
> is large accumulations of pending mail and requests.  I have reason to
> suspect that many list owners direct their list-owner mail to
> /dev/null (or whatever the Windows equivalent is, these seem to be
> mostly Windows addicts).  How about a monthly reminder for list owners
> that requires a positive response within a parameterized time or the
> list will be automatically disabled?

That and/or automatic disposition of held messages (i.e. auto-reject,
auto-discard, or <gasp> auto-approve).

-Barry