The mailing list for listmasters using Sympa

[Michael Howe <address@concealed>]

Hello list,

We're currently looking at using Sympa to replace an ageing ezmlm
installation.  Most of the features are fairly straightforward to
replicate, but one is causing us to scratch our heads a little: multiple
email addresses and the web interface.

Our users can have one or more email addresses, and there is no single
canonical one.  For example, I might have the address
'address@concealed' as my primary address (that is, the one the
University's mail system will send from, if I'm using that), but
'address@concealed' if I also work in the Chemistry department.
 Any address can be subscribed to a list; we can't force it to simply be
the primary one.

We have a SSO system (using Webauth, which basically sets REMOTE_USER to
the user's username), and we can map usernames to a list of email
addresses (and even have a reasonable guess at the 'primary' address).

The sticking point is how to tell Sympa about these addresses.  We're
currently thinking that we should have a form when you first visit Sympa
(after logging in) that asks the user to choose their email address, and
then proceeds using that.  A drop-down box in the header/footer/sidebar
would let them select an alternate address if they decided part-way
through their session that they wanted the other address (eg for archive
access).  Obviously, people with only a single address could skip all that.

Does this seem sensible, and if so, can anyone suggest ways to integrate
this with Sympa?  Has anyone done anything similar?  I feel like
generic_sso should be able to handle a lot of this, but can't quite see
how.  Or is there another solution that we've missed?

Looking at the end-user documentation for some other places using Sympa,
they've mostly worked around this by simply saying "you may only use one
address, if you change it you have to notify us", but that's simply not
practical for us.

We're using Sympa 6.1.17 as packaged by Debian (with a fair few local
patches), but could move to 6.1.19 if that would make things easier.

Best wishes,

Michael

-- 
Michael Howe, Systems Development and Support Section
IT Services, University of Oxford