Re: New sub/unsub confirmation links

 
From: "Justin J" <justin@PROTECTED>
Date: March 9th 2013

I'm going to release v6 2 0 of Dada Mail fairly soon - here's the draft of what this new release will entail - it's a followup to some of the things I noticed with the 6 1 0 release:

In v6 2 0 of Dada Mail, we've made some more strides in making the subscription confirmation system in Dada Mail as secure as possible, without adding any unneeded complications

The new enhancements made in v6 1 0 seem to be working great - I'm actually surprised that the move to this entirely new system went as smoothly as it did In v6 2 0, we did add some additional backwards compatibility, so if your users encounter an old-style confirmation link, Dada Mail will intelligently handle the request

Also new in v6 2 0 is a simple check that the confirmation of a sub/unsub is coming from the same IP address as the initial sub/unsub request We're noticing that mail readers - mostly web-based mail readers, sometimes follow the links that are in the messages you send, including ones sent by Dada Mail

It's not entirely clear why they do this, but it's certainly happening We're coming to the conclusion that the majority of "phantom" subscribing/unsubscribing happening in Dada Mail (and loops of sub/unsubs) is happening because these programs are following the links themselves, rather than an actual human, reading and reacting to the message

This is pretty detrimental, when it comes to Dada Mail's confirmation system One thing that we've noticed is that since the actual user, and these programs are located in different places (your user is perhaps in an office, at work, the program is in a server farm somewhere far away), that a tell-tale sign that something fishy is going on, is when the IP Addresses of the request to sub/unsub and the confirmation to sub/unsub come from different places

So, in v6 2 0, if this is detected, the confirmation won't go through, without someone - hopefully human, clicks a big button in their web browser:

[photog]

It's our hope that an actual user won't ever need to see this screen - as a sub/unsub request and its confirmation should happen at the same IP address In certain cases, this won't be true: say someone requests to subscribe at home, rushing to drive to work, where they then check their email again to complete the subscription Then, there will be two different IP addresses - but it still not the end of the world, when it comes to this nascent subscription

This extra step isn't meant to be something hard to figure out, it's only there to short circuit some sort of automated process That's why it's not a form that requires a CAPTCHA to be figured out, or anything like that

So that's what's to look forward to, with v6 2 0 If you're running v 6 0 1 or below, this is def a great time to upgrade

I'm currently running this version on,

http://dadamailproject
com/cgi-bin/dada/mail
cgi/

Seems to be working just fine I'm hoping this will be a big nail driven into the, "infinite sub/unsubs" coffin

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