The mailing list for listmasters using Sympa

["Patrick von der Hagen" <address@concealed>]

Hi all,

after using sympa 5.3.3 for several weeks, I'd like to share some
thoughts about it. I'll probably file some of them as feature-requests,
but I'd like to have some feedback from the community first...

First, the upgrade vom 5.2.x went fine, almost no problems. However,
German umlauts in the list-config were not converted to UTF8 properly
and people using umlauts in their passwords ran into problems, too. They
could not use their old password anymore and the password they reqested
with "remindpasswd" was their old one with garbled umlauts. I had to
manually set their passwords to "NULL" in the mysql-database, afterwards
sympa sent out new random passwords.

Now I'm not sure wheter sympa should or should not have the ability to
reset the user-passwords to a random string instead of decrypting the
original one and sending it out.

Imagine an attacker getting access to a users mailbox, requesting a
password-reminder, getting the password and deleting the message without
the user noticing. The attacker would have access to sympa (and possibly
other accounts of the user "protected" by the same password, without any
hint to the user. If the password was set to something random, the
attacker would only gain access to sympa and the user would realise that
something went wrong, because his old password would have been
invalidated.
And of course I'd have less trouble with passwords broken due to
umlauts. ;-)


Second, sympa now highlights changes done in the admin-interface by a
violett background. That's great, but unfortunately way to many options
are highlighted as changed. For example, access the
list-definition-page, click on "update" without changing anything. I'll
report that as a bug...

Third, their is the great new log accessible to all owners. However, I
somehow failed to find documentation about it...
I've trouble searching for anything, the search period is less than a
day, which is way to short. Some entries are difficult to interpret, for
example there is "DoMessage" with status "moved in spool" right before
"DoMessage" with no status at all, but that combination seems to say
"successful distribution". For my listowners to interpret those logs I
need some more abstraction. But don't get me wrong, I'm really happy
about this new feature.

Fourth issue, one of my users complained that with the previous release,
his replies where tagged with "Re: " at the beginning of the subject and
so for a list with tagging the reply-subject read something like "Re:
[listname] original subject". Now, he says, sympa moves the tag to the
start of the subject which is then "[listname] Re: original subject". As
there are more and more replies, more and more "Re: " is added and the
supression of "Re: " that his MUA usually does won't work.
Did I miss something in the changelog about that issue?


-- 
CU,
   Patrick.

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