[Mailman-Users] Feature Request: Selective Mass Subscription

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Michael Welch writes:

 > I think that bulk adding is a dangerous thing to allow, from the
 > host's viewpoint at a minimum. Who's to say what unscrupulous
 > a-holes are ready to take advantage of that ability.

Very dumb ones.  I really don't see a major social problem here; as a
host, make your users pay a couple months in advance and throttle them
to X total recipients/day by default.  The small-time spams possible
under those conditions are not effective.  Really dumb people will
rediscover the extremely low cost of email every few weeks, get
terminated with extreme prejudice from their ISPs, featured in the
local newspaper in one of those "there but for the grace of God go I"
articles with their names changed, become the laughingstock of the
neighborhood and have their kid nicknamed "Son of Spam".  Net social
cost will be tolerable (just like drinking, smoking, watching iCarly,
running negative ads in your campaign for President, and all the other
familiar American vices).

What the really unscrupulous a-holes are doing is making bots out of
the host's customers.

IMO, the real problem is the professional spammers with their botnets
and their look-the-other-way IP-block-poisoning pet ISPs.  There is no
way that more than 1% of the spam I get comes from Mom & Pop shops
using the mass subscribe feature of Mailman.

However, that real problem is a *big* problem, enough so that an awful
lot of people have a "zero tolerance" attitude toward spam.  That
means that they dog-pile on the easy targets: the dimwits who try to
spam using an ISP-provided cPanel Mailman, and so on.  Except that
they can't identify the dimwits, so they dog-pile on the ISPs hosting
the dimwits.  But the ISPs can't afford to have that happen too often,
so ... voila! draconian restrictions.

 > That also said, we still get occasional folks that say, "why
 > the tarnation did you add me to your mail list" even when they
 > specifically requested it--they forget what they requested, I
 > suppose. At least they respect us enough not to complain to our
 > host or spamcop.

Right.  This is part of what I meant above by "tolerable" social
costs.