On Tuesday 03 January 2006 01:40 am, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > (This has probably already been thought of and discussed. I'm not > even saying this is the case here, just some thoughts.) > > Could this be a new form of mild denial-of-service attack? Imagine, > someone who has a grudge against a mailing list finds some addresses > that have anti-spam autoresponders like this one. Then they set up > some dummy addresses that do nothing but forward list posts to the > autoresponding addresses. Then anyone who posts to the list gets > bogged down with autoresponders, and it's practically impossible for > the listmasters to figure out which addresses are causing it.
I think it is more likely some idiot subscribed, was too frustrated or idiotic to unsubscribe, left it set up, and got removed, then wanted more info, and had a friend automatically forward all the e-mails to him, not realizing his idiocy was still causing problems. I am slow to attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity. > Maybe the only way to track down the bad addresses is to examine > subscription history and cross-reference that with the times that the > autoresponses were first seen. I would think it would work better to write a script that automatically cross references the DU and DD lists (since this jerk seems to be on both), and generate a one time email (like, "PLease confirm you are subscribed to this list!"), with each e-mail having a different ID number in it (or the ID in the subject). Then when the e-mail gets bounced back or whatever, it would be a snap to match it with the person forwarding it. But I'm sure there are those who are much wiser and much better hackers than I working on this one. Hal -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
