On Jan 31, 2004, at 15:48, Kelly Anderson wrote:
At 02:58 PM 1/31/2004, you wrote:
Non-member posts are held for moderation. Most are spam, and easily discarded. However, some of the lists get quite a bit of spam and the admins don't want to sift through it all looking for the "help! i can't get X to work" message from someone who didn't subscribe yet.
So why not just throw that all away? Just bounce it with a "you must join the list to post" message? It's not all that big a deal for a human to join a mailing list... much harder for a spammer's automated computer.
We could for most of the lists. (And indeed, people get an automatic response that complains they aren't subscribed.)
There's also a pseudo-list that's used as a contact address for the German Wikipedia, though. For that we _need_ to accept non-subscribed addresses.
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)