The mailing list for listmasters using Sympa

[Niklas Matthies <address@concealed>]

Hello,

In the context of our situation described in the email quoted below,
we noticed the following problem. On open lists where everyone can
subscribe, everyone can subscribe through the web interface even
without logging in. In our case, users tend to specify the "wrong",
i.e. the short one instead of the long, canonical one (see again in
the email quoted below) when subscribing this way without having
logged in first. Furthermore, due to the canonicalization made by the
LDAP lookup, they are not able to login to the account of this "wrong"
email address later on.

Therefore, is it possible in Sympa to restrict list subscription to
logged-in users? This would prevent our users to subscribe themselves
with the wrong email address.

-- Niklas Matthies


On Mon 2010-11-08 at 16:22h, Niklas Matthies wrote on sympa-users:
> The "bugfix"[1] from Revision 6168 breaks our use case.
> 
> Our users have two email addresses, a long one (e.g.
> address@concealed) and a short one (e.g. address@concealed,
> effectively an alias). While everyone uses the short address when
> typing their (or other people's) email address somewhere, the long one
> is actually the canonical address, in particular it is the address
> automatically inserted into the From header field when users send mail
> going outside of MS Exchange.
> 
> For this reason the long email address is the one to be used when
> subscribing to a Sympa mailing list. Subscribing with the short email
> address wouldn't work for posting to a non-public list because the
> messages always appear to come from the long email address wouldn't be
> matched up with the subscription.
> 
> We use the LDAP lookup to canonicalize the login to the long
> (= canonical) email address so that users login to the same account
> regardless of which email address they enter.
> 
> (In our auth.conf we have:
> 
>     get_dn_by_email_filter (|(mail=[sender])(userPrincipalName=[sender]))
>     email_attribute        mail
> 
> Here "mail" is the long email address while "userPrincipalName" is the
> short email address.)
> 
> The "bugfix" causes this canonicalization to not work anymore. Users
> are now logged in to different accounts depending on whether they
> enter their long email address or the short alias address.
> 
> I guess this is something that should be configurable in Sympa. (At
> least until there is true support for Sympa accounts to have multiple
> email addresses.)
> 
> -- Niklas Matthies
> 
> [1] [bug][Submitted by M. Warkus, univ. Marburg] When a user logged
> in, using LDAP, by providing an email address, if this email was not
> the first one in the LDAP email attribute, then the uiser was not
> logged with the address she provided but with the default address
> found in the LDAP directory. Now, if an email is provided and the
> login is successful ,the user is logged in with the email she
> provided.
>