[Mailman-Users] Feature Request: Selective Mass Subscription

[Hank van Cleef]

The esteemed Brad Knowles has said:
> 
> Personally, I would be happy to see the "mass subscribe" feature go away 
> completely from the web interface of Mailman, or at least disabled by 
> default.  But then I've been fighting spam since the time I was the Sr. 
> Internet Mail Administrator at AOL in '95, and this is a subject that I feel 
> very strongly about.
> 
I am going to go on record as very strongly OPPOSED to removal of the
"mass subscribe" feature.  We used it as the only method a new user
can subscribe to the list.  

Our method for new subscribers is to direct them to a web page with a
form they fill out.  On completion, that form is mailed by a cgi
script to the moderators.  After moderator review, we manually add
those we approve to Mailman through the "mass subscribe" interface.

The two mail subscription ports (-join, -subscribe) are disabled.  
Some time ago I did a check to see how much spam and how many bogus
attempts to subscribe those ports got.  Answer: plenty, and it was
quite clear that there were several attempts to evade our checks by
listers we had removed for list violations.  

I don't know what you did at AOL, but I'm here to tell you that AOL in
general was one big headache right from the get-go, and the source of
many disguised attempts to thwart our subscription policies.  We're
down to two AOL subscribers who are very well known to the moderators.

Hank