Due to rising levels of spam on mediawiki-l and wikitech-l, I've set the lists to automatically discard all non-subscriber posts, as has been previously done on wikipedia-l and wikien-l.
With a ratio of something like 50 mortgage & viagara spams to each "forgot to subscribe before asking a question" post, it's rather time-consuming. :(
As always, if you want to read through the web archives or news gateway, you can disable direct mail delivery when you subscribe.
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)