[website-discuss] Re: Mail list subscriptions on a go slow?

[Stephen Hahn]

* Derek Cicero <derek.cicero at sun.com> [2007-02-08 15:01]:
> Ian Collins wrote:
> >I'm still have problems subscribing, this time it's to i18n-discuss.
> 
> All subscribe/un-subscribe activities have slowed to crawl due to a 
> large number of bogus subscription attempts. Were are trying to clear 
> out the problem, but all confirmations should eventually reach their 
> destination in the next 12-24 hours.
> 
> Sorry for the inconvenience.

  I have made a number of updates to the Mailman and Postfix
  configurations to reduce tolerance for ill-formed or fictionally
  originated mails, as well as introducing some basic blacklisting.
  Additionally, I've adjusted the timeouts on various Mailman failures
  (bounces, discards, subscription requests) to be more severe. 

  None of the measures are particularly unusual--I run most of the
  Postfix settings at home--but if your legitimate mail is (or you hear
  of legitimate mail being) dropped, please let me know.

  (The problem is that we have *-subscribe and *-unsubscribe for all the
  aliases, and these have been found by the harvesters.  Each of these
  aliases triggers a Mailman command evaluation, which is causing 
  Mailman to be very busy examining its records.  We have CPU headroom
  on the machine, so I will probably look at options for increasing the
  number of Mailman daemons for this queue.)

  - Stephen

* Just watching the logs is showing that between strict HELO, requiring
  FQDN, and consulting blacklists is invalidating many messages of
  dubious provenance.  I'm sure, unfortunately, that we're going to find
  many incorrectly configured MUAs in our legitimate population...