We're playing around with greylisting and other spam reduction stuff here, and in the course of that I fatfingered the whitelist a week ago without noticing. So if you're seeing posts with old dates, it's because I just fished them out of the spamtrap.

One of the things we want to get rid of is the silent discarding of spam to mailing lists themselves, for exactly this sort of reason. If we bounce it during acceptance, legitimate users will get an error message (likely telling them to subscribe first), at which point they can email me to tell me I'm an idiot in real time, instead of a week after the fact.

And spammers will get a no-such-recipient, which will occasionally even get the address off the list. (Seldom, though. We still get spam for mailing lists that closed down before the turn of the century, though that might be because their addresses get re-harvested off antique web pages.)