I am an owner of one of the groups EJP joined and received the digest before his membership was approved. He mentioned that he received the digest in his reply to our request for more info before approval. I checked out the email delivery and activity records. Email delivery logs welcome message and reply. Activity logs his application and my approval. In other words, there is no evidence in the logs that I see that he actually was sent the digest.
This is getting mighty close to a bug. Both in the empty logs and the sending of the digest. We set our archives to restricted because in the past (long before my time and groups.io) there was a flap over posts quoted in published works without acknowledging the authors. If EJP had not been approved, this would have been a tiny violation of the promise that posts are not public. If this is not a bug to be fixed, the behavior should be documented.
I suppose I should enter this in beta, but I'll wait to hear what other managers think.
Best, Marv
Marvin Waschke