I want to allow articles to be submitted by email. I know that setting up a moblog is the way to do that. I also want to make it so that before the article appears to the public, I want to approve it in the conrol panel first (and maybe edit or add data into some of the custom fields). Does the moblog module allow this? If so how? I couldn’t seem to figure it out from the documentation.

You can use {status}pending{/status} (if you have not a pending status yet, should creat one or use “close” instead.

read this for more information.