On 7/20/2004 6:33 PM, Joe DeBattista wrote:

> Hi,
>    We are having alot of problems with users sending SPAM and viruses through
> some of our lists.  One thing we'd like to do is change our lists to require the
> sender to confirm the mail before it goes out to the list.  Is there an easy way
> to edit a bunch of lists to add some code without having to call up each list
> separately?  We are running listserv 1.8d on an AIX server.  Any suggestions
> would be helpful.  Thanks.

Hypothetically, you could write a script to do this, but the somewhat free-
form nature of list header files, and the myriad of possible options on the
'Send=' statement will make it difficult. If you have a large number of lists,
this will not scale well.

In essence, this is a three-step process for each list.
1. GET the list header file.
2. Make the appropriate change to the list header file.
3. PUT the list header file.

Steps 1 and 3 are fairly straight-forward. Step 2, however, is going to
be the real challenge.

Let us assume that your script will run on the LISTSERV server, and that
your list of LISTSERV postmaster addresses includes an address (or alias)
that is local to the system.

Step 1: Pipe output from listview to grep, looking for lines which begin
with '*'; pipe the results to a temporary file; issue the LOCK command to
lock the list.

Step 2: Update the 'Send=' statement in the temporary file. Implementation
is left as an exercise for the reader.

Step 3: Use the cat and mail commands to submit a PUT job to replace the
list header, using the temporary file as input and the local LISTSERV
postmaster address as the sender address.

Repeat steps 1-3 for each list on the server.

There are undoubtedly other ways to approach this problem.

--
Paul Russell
Senior Systems Administrator
OIT Messaging Services Team
University of Notre Dame