The mailing list for listmasters using Sympa

[Steve Shipway <address@concealed>]

> Is it possible to add a new subscriber directly into (non-default)
> digest format, or to add a user and set their format, by mail as
> listmaster, owner, or moderator, as opposed to depending on them to do
> it for themselves?
...
>Thanks. That, and password approval for admin commands, are significant
>gaps to other list managers.

As you likely know, it is really trivial to forge email, and so allowing 
admin commands to be submitted via email (as opposed to the 
MD5-hash-authenticaiton-based moderation commands) would be amazingly 
insecure, unless you also  mandate S/MIME signatures...  so I would not want 
to have the majority of admin commands able to be done purely via email, or 
at least I'd want to be able to disable it.

By 'password approval for admin commands', do you mean asking for 
re-authentication by admins when they do a major command via the web?  This 
would be a good idea, if it were possible to define which commands need the 
additional authentication.  However, it might cause issues with sites such as 
ours which use an external auth mechanism (two-factor via Shibboleth), as in 
this case it would not be able to use the web server to handle authentication.

Steve

Steve Shipway
University of Auckland ITS
UNIX Systems Design Lead
address@concealed
Ph: +64 9 373 7599 ext 86487