Re: list

[Xander Jansen <]

Roderik,

In your message of Wed, 11 Feb 1998 19:13:51 +0100 you wrote:

+ (This does not, however, stop people from forging a subscription
+ e-mail to majordomo, so that it seems to come from e.g.
+ <false.address@localhost, and subscribing 'themselves' to the list.
+ 
+ I personally doubt whether we would want to spend our resources on
+ approving every single subscription request to a RIPE mailinglist
+ manually. Especially since it would not yield much;
+ some.student.hackers@localhost could still forge mail from
+ a.journalist@localhost, and the moderator would probably not spot
+ this & subscribe him.)

Do as other listmanaging software does: if a subscription request comes in, 
assign it a number, send that number to the originator of the mail and ask 
her/him to confirm the request with that number. Only the confirmation mail 
will actually subscribe to the list. Works automatically without human 
intervention and thus saves the list managers (the people) work and as a 
side effect the 'originator' will know when someone else forges 
subscription requests.

+  * - that it would be impossible to fetch E-mail addresses from
+  * members of the list.
+ 
+ Thanks for making your point; this is not in place.  At this moment
+ anyone can get a list of the people subscribed to our majordomo
+ lists. Up till now we had no complaints about this fact. But I'll
+ raise this issue here & see what others think.

I'll unsubscribe immediately ;-)

[...]

+ Obviously, you could still use this list for spamming, because you
+ could still send e-mail forging an address which you know is on this
+ list. 

And since the list can be reviewed by anyone it's fairly easy to find that 
out....

Anyway, nice on topic start of the list (no pun intended) ;-)

Xander