The mailing list for listmasters using Sympa

[Olivier Salaün - CRU <address@concealed>]

Hi Elias,

Éliás Tamás wrote:

Udv / Greetings!

I'm  the  admin  of  a  University in Hungary. I'd like to switch to a
mailing  list manager, that fulfills the following requirements, or at
least with some hacking it would do the trick:

1.  authenticating using an existing ldap database
  

Sympa provides many authentication backends including LDAP, CAS Single Sign-On, Shibboleth.
See http://www.sympa.org/doc/html/node13.html

2.  The  ability to create non-invitation based lists, so, I'd like to tell who can be the member of each list)
  

You can use Sympa's 'include' feature to include list members from any external data source (SQL Db, LDAP directory, flat file, remote list,...).
See http://www.sympa.org/doc/html/node21.html#SECTION002120000000000000000

3. In our openLDAP directory, we have a SubjectCode for each and every student  (their  email  is  hosted  at our server as usual). There are mailing  lists  for  each  subject. If a subject member (a teacher for example)  posts  to that list, the post should be delivered to all the students, having the appropiate SubjectID based on the LDAP directory.
And  for example backwards: only the users, with the given ID can post to the list, andthe post gets to anyone with the same SubjectID.

The  problem is: the student list changes frequently, so that's why it would be good, if I would not need to manage the list memberships too, only  the ldap directory. just to say: dinamic mailing list membership management. :)
  

Sympa allows you to manages so-called list families. A list family is a mailing list template that is instantiated with a set of data. To achieve your goal, the list template would a) include the subjectcode in the custom_subject list parameter b) give posting privilege to teachers, using Sympa's powerful authorization scenarios c) automatically build the list of members from the LDAP directory using the subjectid. In your situation the set of data used for the instantiation would be extracted from your LDAP directory ; the set of data being an XML file.

Note that all that is dynamical since :

• Sympa automatically maintains the list of members for each list
• Authorization privileges can be based on an LDAP filter query
• The list of list (belonging to a list family) can be updated regularly with updated sets of data : new lists will be created, old ones will be automatically removed

The family concept has recently been extended by S. Amrani (working for the French ministry of Defence) : lists belonging to a family can now be created "on the fly", ie when a mail is received for the list. The mecanism is quite sophisticated ; the goal is to avoid the creation of thousands of lists if most of them are unused.

Of  course  there are some invitation-based lists too, but that is the usual story...

Or may I seek for other sofware not a mailing list manager??

You're knocking at the right door ; Sympa is the result of our work to provide a mailing list software that is adapetd to French universities needs (LDAP, Single Sign-On sistems, S/MIME features,...), and actualy it is now used by universities (and other companies, institutions) wold-wide.