Regarding the large amount of spam subscription requests (which I've encountered as well on the global-renamers queue) enabling "Confirm and approve" subscription in the privacy section (which requires potential subscribers to confirm through a link in their mail) seems to have worked for me.

I believe that by unlisting the mailing list ("Advertise this list when people ask what lists are on this machine?") you block all subscriptions, though I'm not certain.

Savh
From: R. Acconish
Sent: ‎29/‎08/‎2015 18:21
To: Announcements for mailing list admins
Subject: Re: [List admins] deleting unmoderated messages after 90 days

Anthony,
Can you please explain how to turn off subscription requests ?
Thanks,
Racconish

2015-08-29 12:29 GMT+02:00 Anthony <wikiagk@gmail.com>:
Racconish, we had the same problem a year or so back on enwiki's
arbcom-l. We resolved it by turning off subscription requests (the
thinking was that a listadmin would always subscribe the new members
anyway). Would recommend you do the same.

On 27 August 2015 at 19:13, R. Acconish <racconish@gmail.com> wrote:
> Don't know if this is related but car-fr-l has been receiving an abnormal
> amount of subscription requests for the last 3 days.
> Cheers,
> Racconish
>
> 2015-08-25 17:58 GMT+02:00 Doug Weller <dougwellerarbcom@gmail.com>:
>>
>> This is scary, as it suggests that there must be some genuine emails not
>> getting through. If there are particular lists where the numbers are much
>> higher than others than perhaps we should be told.
>> Doug Weller
>>
>> On Mon, Aug 24, 2015 at 9:33 PM, Daniel Zahn <dzahn@wikimedia.org> wrote:
>>>
>>> Hello list admins,
>>>
>>> we have found that globally we had over half a million
>>> mails in mailman lists that were not moderated.
>>>
>>> So that means they got held in the moderation queues but were not
>>> accepted or discarded.
>>>
>>> We have started deleting the oldest ones first (over 1 year old) then
>>> moved to (older than 6 months).
>>>
>>> We are planning to setup an automated cron job to do this
>>> automatically in the background.
>>>
>>> Currently the plan is to delete all messages that are held and older
>>> than 90 days.
>>>
>>> Please let us know if any concerns and moderate a bit more if this
>>> affects your list.
>>>
>>> Thank you and best regards,
>>>
>>> Daniel
>>> --
>>> Daniel Zahn <dzahn@wikimedia.org>
>>> Operations Engineer
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> Listadmins mailing list
>>> Listadmins@lists.wikimedia.org
>>> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/listadmins
>>
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Listadmins mailing list
>> Listadmins@lists.wikimedia.org
>> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/listadmins
>>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Listadmins mailing list
> Listadmins@lists.wikimedia.org
> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/listadmins
>



--
Anthony

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