On 8/14/06 5:42 AM, "Barry Warsaw" <barry@python.org> wrote:
Today, held messages still have to be approved by the moderator. What I propose is to allow posters to self-moderate, simply by verifying that their address is real. This probably means a clickable link and (maybe) a header cookie for replying. Think Gmane's auto-moderation approach.
Unfortunately, the would-be posters then have to be notified of the message status. Thus, while you're reducing moderator workload, the backscatter problem isn't solved.
Unfortunately, we know MTAs are hard to write (Exim is still evolving; Postfix took much longer to write than the author expected; sendmail will never be finished). Mailing list managers are hard to write (Mailman is still evolving).
So an integrated MTA/MLM would be hard to write (it wouldn't need all the bells and whistles of a full MTA, and would simplify some of the MUA's problems, so the difficulty is probably less than the sum of the difficulties, but still probably more than either alone). (And a newly-written thing doing SMTP would be insecure.)
So aside from ruining email, the spammers have ruined email mailing lists. Perhaps irretrievably (at my age of 67, certainly irretrievably in my working lifetime).
None of which means it shouldn't be tried, although perhaps it should be tried in the world of whatever comes along to provide a working replacement for SMTP.
--John