On 23 March 2015 at 08:42, Joe Brockmeier <jzb@redhat.com> wrote:
Hi all,

For whatever reason, we're seeing a fair number of complaints that
people are being spammed by subscription requests. It looks like there's
some sort of script hitting a number of mailman installations and
sending subscribe requests for a variety of email addresses.

I have no idea what this accomplishes for the person(s) behind the
bot(s) but it's annoying people and AFAIK we don't have a good way of
blocking it.

We could cut this off at the pass by turning off the ability to
subscribe, but that means we'd have to process subscription requests
manually and some folks might not subscribe if they have to jump through
additional hoops. But I don't think the subscription rate is
particularly high for this list - so that may be a minor issue.

Thoughts? I hate to make things more complicated, but I also would like
our list software not be abused.

So it looks like someone has decided to use a botnet to subscribe 4000+ addresses to marketing over and over again. The ips are all over the world so it is not going to be easy to block so I am guessing it will be best to turn off subscribe until we can find a better solution. This might be multiple ones as someone seems to be doing every person in @qq.com and another set is doing other email sites. 
 
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Stephen J Smoogen.