Lyris User's Guide
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Security Recommendations for Announcement lists
Table of Contents
· Introduction
· Email Commands
· Web Interface for Users
· Server Administrator
· Site Administrator
· List Administrator
· Other Topics
· · Security Considerations
· · Security Issues Relating to Members
· · · Access to the list archives
· · · Access to the list of members
· · · Access to Subscribe to the Mailing List
· · · Steps to restrict false impersonations
· · · Security Features for Posting Messages
· · · Access to unsubscribe and change settings
· · · Visibility of the existence of the mailing list
· · · Web Interface Access
· · · Overview of Lyris List Manager Posting Security
· · · Security Considerations of the From: field
· · · Security Recommendations for Announcement lists
· · · How Lyris List Manager Determines the Identity of the Person Posting
· · Lyris List Manager Mail Merge
· · The Lyris List Manager command line
· · Modifying lyris.plc
· Add-On Packages
· Installing and Upgrading
· Appendix
· Frequently Asked Questions

Security Recommendations for Announcement lists

With announcement lists, it is known that disreputable persons forge the From: headers of their email messages, in order to try to appear as the administrator, so that their advertisements are distributed on other people's mailing lists. For this reason, on announcement lists, we recommend that you take the following steps:

* First, make your list posting by administrators only

* Then, either set the list to moderate all messages (including your own) or use an action phrase to set up a posting password/secret code to reject all messages that do not have the required code. Alternatively, you can use the password-based posting feature that was introduced in Lyris List Manager version 2.548.

A more radical step is to disallow email submissions entirely and only use the web interface to create messages. Yet even more secure would be to put the web interface behind a firewall, so that outsiders cannot get to it, or to put it in an undocumented server location, so that other people do not know it is there.

A complete listing of every security feature for posting is available in the section titled Security Features for Posting Messages.

Other pages which link to this page:
  • Security Issues Relating to Members
  • Page 439 of 629