[Dune-devel] List subscriptions via web frontend blocked

[Jö Fahlke]

Hi guys,

I'm sorry, but I had to block subscribtions to mailing lists via the web
frontend.  Users will have to write a mail to list administrators to get
subscribed.

Apparently, since a few months, there are bots going around stuffing random
email addresses into our subscription form, probably in an attempt to verify
credentials from some leak.  As is good practice, we then send out a
confirmation request to that email address to make sure they really want to
subscribe.  This would be fine if an email address is wrongly entered into the
form only on occasion.  However, some email addresses get subscription attemps
every few minutes.

Understandably, those users are not happy about that and complain to their
providers, who then proceed to block our IP address, so we are unable to send
any kind of mail to any of their users.  This includes providers such as yahoo
or icloud.

To avoid that, the easisest solution I could come up with was to block
subscription attempts altogether.  People will now get an error page, telling
them to send an email to the list owners instead.

@List owners: you can still subscribe poeple in the list admin interface via
the mass subscribe feature.  Please do not subscribe directly, instead send
invites.

I'm open for better suggestions, so long as they are not too much effort.
Mid-term we still have an upgrade to Mailman3 (or some other list manager) on
the horizon, and I hope that such an upgrade will allow us to use some sort of
captcha to remove the manual effort on your side.

Regards,
Jö.

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