Re: Dodgy Looking Subscribers to List.

[Bob Proulx]

Hello Ralph,

Ralph Corderoy wrote:
> The nmh-workers@nongnu.org list recently gained three subscribers in a
> short time.
> 
>     Joe Arguello <dirteboi14@gmail.com>
>     reg@pelatihanwirausaha.com
>     mailbox@open.my.id
> 
> Google knew little about them and none of them have replied after a few
> days so I unsubscribed them.

Whatever.  But help me to understand the reasoning here.  What is your
goal?  I see that nmh-workers has 148 subscibers at this time.  Is
your goal to keep the subscribers to only those that you know are
active participants?  What is your criteria for keeping an address
subscribed?

Note that I see at least a few public email archives in the subscriber
list.  Which means that anyone could be reading the list from the
public email archives.

BTW I see Joe Arguello arguellojoe530@gmail.com in the list too.

> I was thinking they may have subscribed to other nongnu.org lists too so
> thought I'd point it out in case that's helpful.  Or perhaps there's
> already screening of log files for multiple subscriptions by one address
> reaching a threshold within a short time.

For the most part the GNU mailing lists are all open lists without a
restriction as to who may subscribe.  They are publicly archived in
many places.  For example Gmane, Mail-Archive, Nabble, MARC, and of
course Google.  Therefore for those lists there is no restriction
placed on who may subscribe for those open lists.  And we don't try to
monitor subscriptions for them in any way.

There are closed private lists which are exactly the opposite.  For
those we don't advertise the list.  We don't allow automated
subscription.  We usually silently discard subscription requests to
them if there happens to be someone who has found the list in spite of
trying to keep it private.

Bob