[Mailman-Developers] FYI -- mailback validations no longer safe?

[Larry McVoy]

[lotso spam avoidance discussion]

Folks, I am not a Mailman developer, I use it to host the mailing lists for
musictogether.com and like it a lot.  But I have an idea/question.

Is it possible to put a list into a mode where it is partially moderated and
partially unmoderated?  Where moderated applies not only to posting but to
all other operations as well, such as querying the list members.

If you could, I think this would fix the spammer problem somewhat.  Here's
how.

Suppose you set up a new list, when people subscribe, they are automatically
in the moderated category.  They do their first post, the moderater looks at
it, it's either obviously OK or not.  If it is OK, the moderater OK's it
and switches the user from moderated to unmoderated status.

This puts some amount of work onto the list owner, but the amount of work
quickly dies down, and in fact, I think it is probably less work than 
other approaches.

Can mailman do this?  If not, could it?  Would it be a good idea?
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Larry McVoy            	 lm at bitmover.com           http://www.bitmover.com/lm