Re: Manually adding Subscribers to an ezmlm list

> Charles Cazabon <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>Have your web form (or a script that process the test file)
simply send a
>completely blank email to the ezmlm subscription address.  i.e.,
if your list
>is "[email protected]", and someone puts "martin@internal" into
the form, just
>have your script send a blank mail message to
>[email protected].
>
>This means you're not losing the advantage of ezmlm's
subscription forgery
>prevention.  If you just use ezmlm-sub, you completely lose that
advantage,
>and open your mailing list up to abuse.

Charles is absolutely right... in some contexts, subscription
management abuse can be a real problem.  It may be important to
prevent one person from changing another person's subscription
status.

That said... it's probably worth noting that the built-in
confirmation mechanism used by Ezmlm generates some loooooooooong
e-mail addresses that your users have to reply to in order to
confirm their subscription request.  A number of common e-mail
clients (MUAs) have trouble with these long addresses and your
users will have difficulty or be entirely unable to confirm their
request.  These long conf addresses are technically legal
(conform to spec) and hence it is the MUAs that are broken.

The above caused me to have to spend time helping users through
the problem -- more support time than I found acceptable.  It got
to the point where I was weary of explaining the situation to them.

I can't fix their MUAs and I can't force my users to use "better"
software.  My solution (not unique to me, nor invented by me) was
to create a "stub" file on the web server and send the user an
e-mail containing a URL that brings them back to my web site. 
The URL contains enough information to connect the user with the
right stub file on the web server.  When the user clicks on the
URL in the e-mail they receive, their request is confirmed. 
Thus I have virtually obliterated the support drag that the
built-in Ezmlm conf mechanism created.

I'm would encourage you to use some kind of conf mechanism if you
are going to allow people to sign up over the web.  I just wanted
to alert you about the potential support issues you may have to
deal with if you use the built-in Ezmlm conf mechanism.

-- David Bell