The mailing list for listmasters using Sympa

[Olivier Salaün - CRU <address@concealed>]

Hi Jeff,

We must admit that the features related to alternate email addresses management in Sympa are currently very poor.
Basically, here is what we provide :

• an alternative_email_attribute can be declared in the auth.conf file. When the used authenticates using this LDAP backend, Sympa's web interface is able to set an alternate_email HTTP cookie that provides him/her a way to switch between identities.
• in the same manner we provide a way for the user to declare an alternate email address, via the web interface
• the user can request his subscriptions (involing different email addresses) to be unified

Are here is what we plan to do in the future :

• alternate email addresses could be collected while building a list of members as LDAP-based
• alternate email addresses should be stored centrally in Sympa user table (no more in a cookie)
• beyond the "subscriptions unification" feature, a user's alternate email addresses should be considered equivalent for every operations, including mail submition

If you have further ideas for the design of this feature, please complete this entry of our bug/feature tracking system :
http://listes.cru.fr/mantis/view_bug_page.php?f_id=0000269

Thank you.

Jeff Abbott wrote: One of the problems we're encountering when doing migration testing  with Sympa here at Duke is involving alternate email addresses.   Frequently what will happen is our list owners who are participating  in the testing will create a list and then subscribe lots of users to  the list using the user's username as email addresses  (address@concealed) rather than what they have for their mail  attribute in our directory -- lots of the departmental admins know  their users by their usernames.  This means when the user logs in  they don't see those lists as being subscribed to.

I would suspect the way around this is with the auth.conf setting of  alternative_email_address -- if we point that to another attribute in  their directory entry then the lists should show up for them in the  left-hand part of the page after they log in, right?  Or am I  misunderstanding the functionality of that setting and of alternate  addresses in Sympa?

Also -- and this question may be better suited for sympa-dev --  assuming I am correct in thinking how the alternate email thing  works, how does it handle multi-valued attributes in LDAP?  If a user  had, say, 5 alternate email addresses would there have to be five  different attributes (e.g. altaddr1, altaddr2, altaddr3...) or can it  handle multi-valued attributes (like the standard mailAlternateAddress)?

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