Patrick wrote:
On Mon, 2006-03-13 at 23:06 +1030, Tim wrote:
On Mon, 2006-03-13 at 12:57 +0100, Patrick wrote:
I propose World+Dog is unsubscribed from the list, the mailinglist
software is tweaked to address such problems and let everybody
subscribe again.
The trouble is that even if you did force everyone to resubscribe,
there's nothing stopping a spammer from doing so again. Remember that
they're *receiving* messages from the list, but posting *directly* to
all the victims. Any cretin can do that, and there's little a list
owner can do about that, unless they can figure out which subscriber is
the cretin, and that mayn't be possible.
Reading also James Wilkinson's comments ("the list administrators tried
putting per-subscriber data in the subject of a non-list e-mail sent to
all subscribers, and got nothing back...") I understand now that this is
not an easy problem to solve. I'm not experienced in list admin stuff at
all but could this potentially work? A script that disables mail
delivery to all list subscribers except subscriber <n> and send out an
email to the list. Wait for the uol.com.br response. If it isn't
received, disable mail delivery for subscriber <n>, enable mail delivery
for subscriber <n+1> and send out the message again. Rinse and repeat
until success.
fedora-list is not the only list suffering from this problem - it's also
affecting debian-user, debian-devel (see
http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2006/01/msg00079.html), Canberra
Linux Users Group
(http://lists.samba.org/archive/linux/2006-March/015000.html). I suspect
that someone is doing this maliciously.
Paul.
