Banning and unbanning email on all lists

In september 2017, the gluster infrastructure faced a increase in spam with people using a specific pattern to subscribe to the list. In order to fight back, we have deployed several counter measures, one being a command to modify the ban list on every mailling list.

The command need to be executed as root on the lists.gluster.org server:

$ ssh root@lists.gluster.org

Banning a address

A regexp can be used for banning emails. For example, to ban all users with a email like spammer01@example.org, spammer02@example.org, the command would be:

$ /usr/lib/mailman/bin/withlist -a -r unban '^spammer.*@example.org$'

Seeing the current list of ban

To see the current list of bans on all lists, the command is:

$ /usr/lib/mailman/bin/withlist -a -r list_bans

Unbanning a address

To unban massively, the unban command work in a similar way to the ban one:

$ /usr/lib/mailman/bin/withlist -a -r ban '^spammer.*@example.org$'