On Fri, 05 Mar 2004 12:36:04 CST, James Morrill <[log in to unmask]>  said:
> But these people aren't subscribe to the list - why should LISTSERV try
> to delete them from a list they aren't subscribed to?  This seems like
> a HUGE denial of service hole - if someone could add millions of e-mail
> addresses and have each of my lists try to monitor them to see if they
> should be deleted.

Note that this is backwards - what you're seeing is lots of bounces each adding
a single record to a file, and keeping count of how many times that address has
been seen.

So to add millions of e-mail addresses, the attacker would have to pound your
machine with millions(*) of forged bounce messages - at which point the overhead
of actually updating the .AUTODEL file is the *least* of your worries.  You get
that sort of volume, you have a DoS hole in any case.

(*) Yes, I know you can be creative with the contents of an MDN and add multiple
addresses per message - the point is that "just throw it away" is almost the same
resource consumption as "log one address" and "log 100 addresses".

If you're worried about the disk consumption of the autodel file, consider how
many bytes each record in the autodel takes, and then look at how many lines
got written to the listserv log... ;)