[server-admins] mass unsubscribes?

[Troy A. Griffitts]

Hi Karl,

So, the story with this is that we received an upgrade to mailman about 6 weeks ago which removed our manually added captcha to fend off malicious bot subscriptions. We then were again added to public email blocklists. The effort to keep this from happening again involved upgrading to RHEL8 and the latest version of mailman there which includes captcha support, so an update won't override anything we patch manually.

I've done some work to plead with Blocklist maintainers to remove us.

Today is the 1st and mailman mailing list reminders go out today. I received 900 unable to deliver messages.

Most of these are the malicious subscriptions. Some are probably legitimate subscriptions still blocked by their mail server maintainer because of our bad reputation.  The ratio, I guess is about 100:1. My hope is that these people will care enough to notice they are no longer receiving mail. This was weighed against again getting on blacklists for spamming mail servers with hundreds of bad addresses. There are likely still some people subscribed by bots who don't wish to be subscribed, but the monthly reminders and each email tell them how to unsubscribe.

This might not be the most ideal path but it was my best effort to resolve the issue.

Hope that helps explain. Thanks for noticing and being concerned,

Troy 

On September 1, 2022 3:11:07 PM GMT+02:00, Karl Kleinpaste <karl at kleinpaste.org> wrote:
>At 7:53 EDT, crosswire mailman sent me ~130 mailing list unsubscriptions, to all of xiphos-users, -source, and -devel.
>Not all of them are real; I have apparent unsubscribes for users who are still subscribed.
>
>Did something bad just go down?
-- 
Sent from my Android device with K-9 Mail. Please excuse my brevity.
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