[Mailman-Users] Odd Subscriptions

[Mark Sapiro]

On 7/16/2011 2:20 PM, David Andrews wrote:
> 
> Has anyone seen anything like this and what does it mean.  I run a
> server with about 150 public mailman lists on it, and just got about 300
> new subscriptions to various public lists, from the same domain at the
> same time.  It is "apot.com" and the form is firstname dot lastname at
> apot.com and the first and last names are all different but believable. 
> Is this like the zeusmail.com subscriptions a while back, I got a bunch,
> but never knew what they were about.


It's answerpot <http://answerpot.com/> archiving your lists.

In my case, they sent an email to the owner of one list about a week
before with links to opt-in immediately or opt-out with the no response
default being opt-in after a week with no response. I didn't respond,
set the list's subscribe police to approve and waited.

The interesting thing is I have a few advertised lists, some active, and
the only one they targeted was effectively dormant. All the lists have
private archives.

I eventually got a couple of subscription requests from addresses
similar to what you describe at apotmail.com. I discarded the requests
and added

^.*[@.]apotmail\.com$

to the ban list of all my lists. Perhaps I'll change that to

^.*[@.]apot(mail)?\.com$

based on what you saw. Interestingly, the names answerpot.com,
apotmail.com and mail.apotmail.com all map to the same IP while apot.com
maps to a different IP which is apparently a reseller - "The domain
apot.com is for sale. To purchase, call BuyDomains.com".

-- 
Mark Sapiro <mark at msapiro.net>        The highway is for gamblers,
San Francisco Bay Area, California    better use your sense - B. Dylan