This idea of included 'dynamic' lists and 'automatic lists' would be
very useful for my application as well. As a follow-up question, would
it be possible for someone who received a message because they were on
an included, automatic list, to unsubscribe from further mailings or
change their reception options?
- Steve
Olivier Salaün - CRU wrote:
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.
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