[spambayes-dev] require subscription?

[Tim Peters]

[Barry Warsaw <barry at python.org>]
> BTW, I tend to agree.  I sure wish Mailman did a mail-back
> confirmation for non-member postings.  I also wish I knew
> someone who could do something about that <wink>.

I've been thinking about that, and have come to believe that the
difficulty is mostly due to your over-complicating the issue.  All we
really need to do is change Mailman to send every message it receives
to barry at python.org, instead of bothering list owners and subscribers
with them.  Then you can personally review each one, and approve,
reject, or discard, as appropriate.  The only approved sender address
on all lists would be hard-coded to barry at python.org, and you would
resend the messages you deemed worthy of subscriber attention.  Since
you already have GnuPG configured, it will be easy for Mailman to
confirm that you really sent such messages.

Even better, users could send their messages to barry at python.org to
begin with!  That will make Mailman even simpler.  It will also save
users considerable time and embarrassment.  For example, sometimes I
really can't tell whether a segfault in Zope is due to a Python bug, a
Zope bug, or a bug in platform-supplied software.  It's embarrassing
to post about it to what turns out to be a wrong list, and that wastes
a lot of peoples' time.  Of course barry at python.org could figure out
the right list to send it to, making life easier for everyone.

Even better, despite that, e.g., I do want to subscribe to various
Zope lists, I don't want to see a lot of the messages they carry.  If
I could subscribe to barry at python.org instead, barry at python.org could
figure out which messages to send me, based on feedback I generously
supply to barry at python.org about messages barry at python.org sent me
that I didn't really want to see.

In the end, barry at python.org will be the only address anyone needs to
know, for list subscriptions, and for sending messages to lists. 
Mailman can be thrown away entirely, and presto!  All the problems
people have with Mailman will go away along with it.

Best of all, we could start doing it today!  In fact, I think I'll
send this message to barry at python.org, to kick it off.