[spambayes-dev] require subscription?

[Seth Goodman]

I wonder if anyone else is willing to reconsider the decision to operate
this list without requiring subscribers to register?  Spambayes does keep
the spam on the list out of my inbox, but unfortunately, virtually all of it
winds up in Unsure, so I have to go through it all anyway.  Despite training
on all of these unsures, some spam, some ham, Spambayes still puts quite a
few posts in the Unsure folder.  In addition, this tends to skew my training
set because the Spambayes lists are the only two lists I'm on that don't
require registration.  All of my other list traffic is taken care of by
Outlook rules and doesn't need to go through Spambayes.  This makes for a
much more focused training set, since Spambayes list traffic looks very
little like my normal correspondence.

I don't feel that the Mailman subscribe/confirmation process would really
scare anybody away, as virtually all lists do this, and for exactly the same
reason.  Why give spammers this free multiplier?  I'm sure the other list
participants would understand and be happy for the spam reduction.  At the
very least, there is no excuse for having Spambayes-DEV not require
registration, but I would argue for requiring it for both lists.

--

Seth Goodman