Comment 9 for bug 194126

So, I agree that we need to decouple teams from mailing lists and make the latter first-class objects. I think there's pretty much widespread agreement on that, and it's just waiting for resource allocation to tackle. Once that's done then "subscribing" and "joining" can really be collapsed to one action, joining a mailing list.

Once that's done, it's not clear to me what "lurking" means. For open mailing lists, if you want list traffic, you'd just join the mailing list. There'd be no team you'd have to join first. John's comment is interesting because he wants to subscribe a bot to the mailing list and not have to create an account for the bot first. I'm not sure we want to allow unregistered/unvalidated email addresses to be subscribed to our mailing lists, because that's a potential vector for abuse. However, we have a second related use case: if we wanted to subscribe an external mailing list to a Launchpad mailing list, you can't really do an email validation dance, since you don't want the external mailing list to receive the confirmation token. I haven't come up with a good workflow to address both the external mailing list and bot use cases.