[Mailman-Users] Permanent subscription ban?

[Brad Knowles]

At 3:58 PM -0500 4/5/07, Jim Garrison wrote:


>  Is there a way to tell Mailman to never allow a specific
>  email address to be subscribed?
>
>  I.e. is there a master "banned email address" list within
>  Mailman, and if so how to I add addresses to it?

Sure.  From the web admin interface for your list, click on "Privacy 
options...", and the first sub-page is "Subscription rules".  Scroll 
down to the "ban_list" field, which has the short description:

	List of addresses which are banned from membership in this
	mailing list.

Then you can either enter specific addresses which are banned, or you 
can use Python regular expressions to ban an entire domain.


In the latter case, to take a couple of examples that were recently 
banned on the mailman-users mailing list, we added:

	^@rnp.br
	^@thehensleys.com

This is because they had subscribed to the mailman-users list from 
addresses that were themselves pointed at mis-configured mailing 
lists, causing every single post to the list to result in a bounce.

When the people who administer these sites figure out that they've 
been unsubscribed and their entire domain has been banned, they can 
come back to us and ask why we took this action, and then we will 
explain the severity of the situation to them.  Once they can 
convince us that this will never, ever happen again, we can re-enable 
subscription access for their domain.


Note that there is no leading whitespace in these regular expressions 
-- the caret ("^") symbol has to be the first character on the line.

-- 
Brad Knowles <brad at shub-internet.org>, Consultant & Author
LinkedIn Profile: <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu>
Slides from Invited Talks: <http://tinyurl.com/tj6q4>