"D. Stussy" <spam@spam.org> writes:

> Preventing a (malicious) flood of these is the point.

I think this is the root of our disagreement. The way I would phrase the
differing perspectives is that you feel we should block invalid email
addresses because they were used in the past in floods of malicious
control messages. I feel that anyone who is trying to be malicious will
look at how the software is widely configured and pick a syntactically
valid email address to avoid that check (and it's trivial to do so and
there's no good way of stopping this).

Does that sound like a fair characterization?

> I did receive one e-mailed newgroup message for the "rtfm" hierarchy
> this month, a hierarchy not in the control.ctl file. The greenend.*
> hierarchy checkgroups message was also emailed because there is
> something wrong with its signature. I don't think that's in the control
> file either, but I have seen it before so it's in my control.ctl.local
> file.

Oh, good point, I forgot that we include a default action of mail for
newgroup and rmgroup. Adding a valid email address filter there makes a
lot of sense to me, given that those messages are essentially useless
unless a news administrator can contact the sender and ask what the
intention was.

--
Russ Allbery (eagle@eyrie.org) <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>