Developers of Sympa

[Jeff Abbott <address@concealed>]

Ladies and gentlemen,

Something I've been thinking about lately with working on our Sympa  
migration at Duke is the addresses Sympa uses for list management.   
These include:

  $LISTNAME-request
  $LISTNAME-editor
  $LISTNAME-subscribe
  $LISTNAME-unsubscribe
  $LISTNAME-owner

The problem as I see it is that two of these addresses are being used  
for the wrong purposes -- $LISTNAME-owner and $LISTNAME-request.  I  
brought up this confusion before, though I don't recall if it was on  
this list or sympa-users, but I think that this use of these two  
addresses is incorrect and I feel that it needs to be changed.

My reasoning for this comes from RFC 2142 - Mailbox Names for Common  
Services, Roles and Functions <http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/ 
rfc2142.html>.  In section six of that document it discusses mailing  
list administration mailboxes and proposes that for any given list  
there be a $LISTNAME-request address that allows you to interact with  
the list management software.  This makes a great deal of sense, as  
they explain, because if I'm on a Majordomo list I'd need to send  
commands to address@concealed, address@concealed for ListServ,  
address@concealed for Sympa, etc, which is very confusing to users.   
$LISTNAME-request allows me to send UNSUBSCRIBE commands to a  
predictable address without having to worry about what software is  
actually hosting the list.  Sympa, according to my understanding,  
uses the $LISTNAME-request address to get in touch with the actual  
person or persons running the list, the list owners.  Logically, this  
is what I would expect $LISTNAME-owner to do, instead of $LISTNAME- 
owner being used for bounce management.  This behavior is also going  
to be confusing to our users as they're used to using $LISTNAME-owner  
coming over from Majordomo, but that's a separate and local policy  
issue, not so much a technical one.

What I would like to see, both for our needs here at Duke and to fit  
with the recommendations of RFC 2142, are the following addresses:

  $LISTNAME-request     -> Another way to send commands to Sympa
  $LISTNAME-editor      -> Contact address for the list's moderator(s)
  $LISTNAME-subscribe   -> An automated address for subscribing  
yourself to a list
  $LISTNAME-unsubscribe -> An automated address for unsubscribing  
yourself from a list
  $LISTNAME-owner       -> Contact address for the list's owner(s)
  $LISTNAME-bounces     -> Address to which all bounces for the list  
are routed

I propose that in order to keep the existing default settings as well  
as to eliminate any shock to existing Sympa sites that some robot- 
level configuration settings be introduced to allow these addresses  
to be customized for to meet each robot's needs.  Say,  
request_suffix, editor_suffix, subscribe_suffix, and so on.  I'd be  
willing to go through the code and add this functionality if there  
were interest in it and Olivier, Serge, and other core developers  
didn't think it was total lunacy.  One of our concerns at Duke is  
that we don't want to be maintaining a fork of the mailing list  
manager we're using, so if there's no chance this could make its way  
into a future version of Sympa then I'd probably be hesitant to do it.

Please let me know what you think, or if you have any words of  
warning or points of inspiration.  I'd love to get started on hacking  
at this.

Thanks,
Jeff

Attachment: smime.p7s
Description: S/MIME cryptographic signature