[Mailman-Users] Auto-generating messages "to the list", instead of "to the member"

[Mike Maughan]

Afternoon all,

Amongst others I run a mailman list for our family history society (The
Maughan Society) and like many such lists we get quite a lot of new members
"dropping in" with a specific query then "dropping out" again once they have
that specific question answered.

Our community aims to keep interested members and to grow in numbers, so one
specific moderation task has been to post a "welcome to new member xxxxx"
message to the list to draw the new member in to discuss their interests and
hopefully to become engaged with the community.  So far, this has been an
entirely manual task but has suffered at times as I and the other moderators
are getting on a bit and periodically go offline with one medical
complication or another.  This can mean that the potential member has gotten
bored and moved on if we haven't responded within the magic 3-day period.

Is there any way I can set up MM to send predefined posts to the list (as
opposed to direct to the poster) on receipt of various triggers?

Also on a related note, is there a way to default MM to put all new members
on moderation by default, perhaps until they have made nn posts?

Regards, Mike