subscribe address spam floods confirmation queue

[Nick Moffitt]

A spammer sent tons of mail to the -subscribe address of a mailing list, causing a large number of pending confirmations to back up in the pending.pck. We need a better tool to flush those out when they occur.

[Mark Sapiro (msapiro)]

What exactly do you want to see?

My experience with this is the addresses in these mass subscriptions match a pattern. Mailman now (since 2.1.21) has a GLOBAL_BAN_LIST feature to block these once they have started and the pattern is recognized.

To address those that have arrived prior to being banned, there is a script at https://www.msapiro.net/scripts/erase (mirrored at https://fog.ccsf.edu/~msapiro/scripts/erase ) that is described by:

"Remove an address or all addresses matching a regexp from the installation. I.e. for every list, if the address is a member, it is removed. If there are any held posts or (un)subscription requests from the address, they are removed too. Optionally, any subscription requests from the address waiting user confirmation are also removed."

Is this the kind of tool you're looking for?

Note that if the only pending requests for a list are these, you can just remove the pending.pck file. Mailman will create a new one when needed.