The mailing list for listmasters using Sympa

[Olivier Salaün - CRU <address@concealed>]

Hi Berge,

I can think of 2 places in Sympa where you could enforce the privileges for creating a mailing list :

1. through the 'create_list' authorization scenario. You can define a custom 'create_list' authorization scenario that may even include custom code through the Custom Conditions (see http://www.sympa.org/wiki/manual/authorization-scenarios#custom_perl_package_conditions). The only drawback though is that the listname provided by the user (who wants to create a list) is not provided in the scenario context. We might change this in future versions of Sympa...
2. through the list_check_smtp sympa.conf parameter that can be used to check if a new listname is valid, see http://www.sympa.org/wiki/manual/conf-parameters/part2#list_check_smtp

Sympa's web interface does not provide a way to build the new listname, the way you expect to do it. You would have to patch the wwsympa::do_create_list() subroutine of Sympa. Another option would be to write your own list creation web application that would then delegate the list creation process to Sympa through our SOAP API. Please check http://www.sympa.org/wiki/manual/soap#sympa_soap_server

Berge Schwebs Bjørlo a écrit :

We're evaluating Sympa at NTNU, a medium-sized university (about 30 000 students and employees) in Trondheim, Norway.

So far Sympa seems excellent for our use cases, though I wonder how to implement namespaces when creating new lists.

Policy-wise, students (and others) are allowed to create personal mailing lists on the following form: address@concealed [0] (with an
arbitrary value of mylist, obviously) and address@concealed for organisations they're listmasters for.

With our current Mailman setup, this is enforced by doing the actual list creation with a external scripts. I wonder if Sympa could be configured to enforce this namespace scheme without resorting to hacks.

I kind of figure this could be done with authorization scenarios.
Unfortunatly, I find http://www.sympa.org/wiki/manual/authorization-scenarios a bit short on info and my level of Google-skills gets me nowhere.

Ideally, the prefix (username or organisation name) should be prepended upon list creation. If I as a regular user (my username is berge) create a list named "foo", the actual list name would automatically become "address@concealed".

If it at all matters, authentication is usually done with generic_sso, with email addresses fetched with LDAP.

Pointers to documentation or hints would be great appriciated!