The Sunday 2004-10-24 at 19:01 +0200, Marcus Meissner wrote:
that way, it would be close to impossible to subscribe a bot, and the people who actually care about getting the list will most probably also like the idea of getting rid of bots&bounces more than they dislike to have to subscribe again.
This is really not the case for this problem, since the autoresponder was most likely subscribed by a system administrator knowingly.
Mmmm... :-? Are you sure? Then he would know what would happen, if he is an admin. I would understand if he is a malicious admin... Notice that it is easy for anyone to subscribe any autoresponder: because the confirmation email will be answered by the autoresponder, and it will get subscribed. Thus, the confirmation email method is not valid any longer on its own: it has to be suplemented with a method to force human intervention by the subscriber. For example, some services I have to use force the user to answer writing between to precisely marked lines (no top posting, no bottom posting, but "midle posting"): anything outside is ignored. Thus, an autoanswer would be ignored. How the bots are getting in could be checked by saving both the subscription email, and the confirmation email, for later checking if necesary. -- Cheers, Carlos Robinson