I own several mailing lists with worldwide 2500 subscribers. For mainly
historical reasons, I use listproc 6.0c written by Anastasios Kotsikonas
together with more than 30 smaller and larger procmail-scripts that deal
with bugs and feature enhancements in listproc (the listproc software is
several years old as it became commercial after this last public release
somewhere around 1994). In the last months, I had several problems with
forged subscriptions. The problem has apparently eased a bit since I
installed the procmail-based spamfilter from Catherine Hampton
(http://www.best.com/~ariel/nospam/) as the forgers (or the targets of the
forgery) seem to come to some extent from known spammers or spamming
sites.
However, I know that both LISTSERV and Majordomo have a feature to request
email confirmation of subscription to protect against forged subscription
requests. I saw that similar things have been discussed on this list in
the past
(http://www.rosat.mpe-garching.mpg.de/mailing-lists/procmail/1997-11/msg00155.html).
Therefore, I would like to ask if anyone has a procmail script that could
do this job, i.e., if a subscription passes the script, it sends back a
confirmation message with a magic cookie and waits for a response with the
same cookie before the command will be forwarded. I am somewhat busy so I
would appreciate if you could reply by email. BTW, I know that it is easy
to write such a procmail script myself as I have written many procmail
scripts in the past, but I simply have no time to program and test this
specific script at this time, and would like to profit from a finished and
thouroughly tested script, e.g. implemented in smartlist. If I had time, I
would switch to another mailing list software such as Majordomo.
I shall be very obliged,
Wolfgang SLANY
mailto:wsi(_at_)dbai(_dot_)tuwien(_dot_)ac(_dot_)at
Technische Universitaet Wien E184-2 TEL: +43-1-58801-6123
Paniglgasse 16, A-1040 Wien, Austria FAX: +43-1-5055304
WWW homepage: http://www.dbai.tuwien.ac.at/staff/slany/