The mailing list for listmasters using Sympa

[David Le Blanc <address@concealed>]

On Fri, Sep 13, 2002 at 09:45:02AM -0700, Adam Bernstein wrote:
>I share Dave's sentiments, and would like to put in my vote for adding
>this feature (and not just through LDAP) at some point.  Users generally
>assume it, and I hate having to disappoint them.  :)
>
>What I've been telling people is they need to subscribe their alternate
>address to all their lists and then set its subscription mode to "no_mail".
>This is not ideal.  ...But it brings up an easy possible solution, since
>we could just add a button on the User Preferences page that would take
>an alternate address and subscribe it to each of the user's lists in the
>no_mail mode, eh?  Taking care of unsubscriptions would be messy, but not
>all that critical, perhaps.  I'll try a hack and report back.

But then the user will have to re-add their alternate address each time they
subscribe to a new list. -- still not ideal.

...it may be not even that complicated...

I haven't looked at any of the Perl code which comprises Sympa, but it seems
that Sympa already takes into account "additional addresses" via web
interface.

So, it would seem all the "hooks" for extending functionality already exist
within Sympa.

What I have in mind is simply a field in Sympa's SQL table in which all the
user's alternate addresses could be associated with the "subscribed" user.
Then, when subscribers are enumerated for scenari's, each "alternate address"
for subscribers could be evaluated as well.
That way, the user isn't _forced_ to "unify" his/her addresses, and nothing is
lost if they do actually want to "unify"; the association between addresses
remains, and they may send to a list they're subscribed from any of their
alternates at any time...

Of course, this is fairly simple in concept, but may be a different matter in
implementation -- like I said, I haven't looked at any of the code yet.

Right now, what I've done is actually "cheat":
        I have a "named filter" which checks [sender] against an alternate 
mail 
        attribute in the entire LDAP directory, assuming the person
        corresponding to [sender] is already subscribed (with a different 
address).
        It would be nice to limit [sender]'s in a named filter (or whatever) 
to
        alternate addresses of the subscribers.

At some point, in my copious spare time, I'll look at the code to determine
how difficult this will be to implement, but all of you waiting for me to
do so shouldn't hold your breath -- you'll turn a deep shade of blue!



...just my 2 cents...


---Dave Le Blanc
Systems Administrator
Computer Science Department
California Institute of Technology