anonymous postings was not so in the past

[Linux for blind general discussion]

The problem with that message is that it still preserved the email 
address, which would then be harvested by spammers. Every time someone 
would send a message to the list when its settings were configured in 
this way, the sender would see about 50 to 100 spam messages for the 
next couple of days, and somehow, most of them got around provider spam 
filters. This may not have been due to the email being in the From: 
header, but it's possible that some other vulnerability in this version 
of Mailman may have been exploited. In any case, it was determined at 
that time by the list owner that it would be easier to anonymize the 
list in this way than to update Mailman. I am on any number of other 
mailman lists that don't appear to have this problem. I do get spam of 
course, but most of it is trapped by spam filters and is either moved to 
a junk folder or is flagged. From what I've seen, the version of Mailman 
running on this listserv is woefully outdated, and so just changing the 
setting as you suggest would bring back the problem we had that resulted 
in the anonymization of posts. It would be far better if it were 
possible to not only change this setting, but to also update mailman to 
a more secure version.

~Kyle