The mailing list for listmasters using Sympa

[Jeff Abbott <address@concealed>]

Sympaers,

I've been trying to figure out a good solution to this problem --  
maybe there isn't one, and users are just going to have to deal with  
it -- and I'm hoping others might have solved similar problems in the  
past.  Most of our lists default to private sending scenarios to  
prevent spam, abusive external users, etc.  Duke users also tend to  
have multiple addresses, with many users electing to use a full name  
alias (e.g. I use address@concealed) but also equally able to use  
their user ID (e.g. address@concealed).  The former is often what's  
set as the user's mail attribute in the directory, but many of them  
send messages using the latter.  This means, of course, their  
messages get rejected, they get confused, and I get email.

What I was hoping is that there were a way to, for instance, run an  
LDAP query, the results of which are then compared against the sender  
list.  All users have both address@concealed and address@concealed  
listed as values in mailAlternateAddress, and it seems like there  
should be a way to leverage this.  Like, for each incoming message run:

  (mailAlternateAddress=[sender])

returning the mail attribute, and then looking to see if that  
returned value fits in is_subscriber.  I was looking at the search  
condition for scenarios, but that appears to only be able to check  
what's in the directory, not compare it against anything or use any  
returned attributes in comparison for other conditions.   
mailAlternateAddress is indexed in our directory, and queries take  
less than .02 seconds including connecting and disconnecting, so I  
don't believe performance would be a problem.

I'd be willing to try adding such support to Sympa, provided we could  
come up with a general enough use case that wasn't so specific to the  
way we do things here at Duke.  Or perhaps there's already a  
workaround that I simply don't know about.  Thoughts?  Questions?

Thanks,
Jeff