>>> "I believe
that was implemented so that others couldn't submit
subscription requests using your email address."
>>> That makes sense for stand-alone groups.
It does for subgroups as well, for the same reason; due to the
inherent insecurity of email it would be easy for someone,
anyone
for that matter, to "subscribe" another member to the subgroup
without them knowing or asking for it; obviously they would have to
know group & member specifics, but think about it for a minute,
it would be akin to
anyone being able to subgroup-DirectAdd
someone. If I knew your group specifics and knew you were a member
and your address, nothing then could stop me from spoofing your
address and subscribe you through email to all the subgroups, and
you wouldn't have a clue, for a while anyway until you got the
welcome notices. The chance of this happening or the reason why it
would doesn't matter, it could be a prank or something
serious/nefarious, without that confirmation email there is a
wide-open hole ready to be exploited.
Email is insecure, being online requires the account to be logged in
hence more secure therefore we can relax a bit.
If your objective is to prevent the confirmation email, and you're
sending out main-group messages with subscribe links to the
subgroups, how about having the links to their home pages instead,
and tell folks to click on Join? Yes I know, it still doesn't
address email-only preferred users, they still would have to do the
extra step. But for the rest, work-wise it's easier and faster to
click once to go to the group home then click Join and be done, and
then they are on the subgroup's pages and can start exploring right
away.
Or alternatively, if the subgroups are announcement groups, you
could have a single link to the main group's "Subgroups" link in
your message, where all the available subgroups are presented and
the members can then join the ones they want to.
Cheers,
Christos