The mailing list for listmasters using Sympa

[Rob McBroom <address@concealed>]

On Oct 16, 2007, at 1:52 PM, Allison Jones wrote:

> Is there any way to keep track of the uid (ex. ajones) in sympa?   
> Right now, if a user changes their e-mail address using our account  
> management tools, sympa has no way of knowing that the user has  
> changed their e-mail address.  I see that Shibboleth can use the  
> netidmap table to accomplish this.   Also, is there a way to pull  
> the gecos_user for sympa's user table from ldap and populate it?

Sympa identifies users by e-mail address and doesn't know or care  
about usernames. Period. This has caused us some grief as well, but  
it's understandable. If it relied on usernames, no one outside of our  
organization could use it, which would be unacceptable to many groups  
on campus.

All of our users have a "primary e-mail" address, which is what gets  
published in the directory and is what gets returned when they log  
into Sympa, etc. We encourage users to use this address for all list  
subscriptions and ownerships. (Some of them even listen.) But  
addresses change.

Here's how we deal with that: Every time a primary e-mail changes in  
our account management system, it adds a row to a "changes" table  
with the old address and the new address. A python script that we  
wrote runs on our Sympa server and monitors the table for changes.  
When it sees some, it basically does a "find and replace" in all  
Sympa tables and all config files.

This is probably not recommended or supported, but it has worked for  
us so far.

The only remaining issues I can think of:

1. If a list is configured to allow mail only from certain addresses,  
and a person's address changes (their list subscriptions are then  
changed as a result), their mail will get rejected unless they change  
the From address in their mail client as well. Theoretically, this  
shouldn't be a huge burden since most changes in e-mail address are  
initiated by the user in the first place. This was a pretty common  
problem when we started allowing people to set custom aliases, but I  
altered the error from Sympa to suggest people check their client's  
From address.

2. We've stopped giving users multiple accounts if they have multiple  
"roles" (student, employee, etc), but each role has a primary e-mail  
attached to it. So if a person logs in with their username, there  
could potentially be more than one primary e-mail address returned  
and it's a coin toss as to which one Sympa will use. (It does tend to  
use the same address each time - the first one returned I think, we  
just can't control which one.)

---
Rob McBroom
Systems Support Specialist II
OIT Enterprise Applications and Services
<http://faith.oit.gatech.edu/>
404-385-0390
address@concealed
I didn't "switch" to Apple... my OS did.