Confirm Subscribes

(optional) Defines whether new members receive a confirmation request when joining the mailing list. The confirmation request will be an email message telling the person that they have requested to join this mailing list and the person will have to respond to the confirmation message in order to become a full member. The new member's status will be set to confirm until the confirmation response is received, and the person will not receive mail from the mailing list until the confirmation is received.

The reply-to email address given in the subscription confirmation request message will be a unique address for that member. You may want to include this address in the body of the confirm document you send out. Thus, the reply-to address is constructed by using the following text:

lyris-confirm-%%memberidchar%%@domain

This is known as "failsafe confirmation" and it allows a member to send a single reply (in response to a single confirmation) to confirm their subscriptions to multiple lists, by simply replying to the message sent to them so, that the actual text contents of their reply is not important.

If a member visits your web site and signs up for four of your lists then you can have ListManager send the new member a single confirmation message for all four lists by using the "oneconfirm" option of the "add" command. When the member replies to this one confirmation request message, the reply will go to the failsafe confirmation address. When ListManager receives mail at this address, ListManager will confirm all outstanding confirmation requests for that member; he or she will be confirmed on all lists where that member's status is "confirm". Please note that this has the consequences of people being unable to confirm membership to one list but decide against joining another.

Confirmation serves several purposes. It is quite common for people to mistype their email address when subscribing to a mailing list using the web interface. Without confirmation the ListManager would waste effort trying to send mail to this incorrect address.

Another need for confirmation is to counter a common form of Electronic Terrorism. The Terrorist will sign someone they wish to harm to many mailing lists (perhaps several hundred) and that person will then be flooded with unwanted electronic mail such that, they will be unable to accomplish any work with that email address. If that person's email server is not perfectly configured the act may crash the person's email server, use vast qualities of Internet bandwidth or prohibit other people sharing the email server from receiving their email.

The Confirmation feature blocks this form of Electronic Terrorism. If the Terrorist subscribes someone to 100 ListManager mailing lists (all with Confirm set to Yes) the person will receive 100 confirmation messages but, no more mail after that. If the person does not respond to the subscription confirmation messages (as they should not), their memberships will not be activated.

We highly recommend that all Open mailing lists use the Confirm feature as this form of Electronic Terrorism is quite common and is very bothersome to the victim.