1. respond to their email with their account information (template coming soon), including a reminder to set up their .forward file if desired, and encourge them to hop onto irc/#meta to meet the community
automated account creation is something that i would like to look into. maybe this can be an admin portal (similar to ~town) that would notify admins when a new signup arrives and prompt them to go to the web interface to approve/deny/respond to the account request.
tilde.team uses [tarsnap](https://tarsnap.com) for backups and is configured to save 12 hourly backups, 7 daily backups, 6 weekly backups, and 2 years' worth of monthly backups.