The mailing list for listmasters using Sympa

[Dick Visser <address@concealed>]

Hi!

On 6 March 2014 13:25, Michael Howe <address@concealed> wrote:
> 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).

I'm in a similar situation. Our SSO system is connected to a large
number of IdPs and federations.
Because of that we do not have a single common attribute that can be
used as identifier.
Therefore we have created an "account linking" module (much like
Logins4life from Kent uni,
http://www.kent.ac.uk/is/projects/loginsforlife/index.html). The
result of this is that we now do have a single identifier, even for
multiple accounts. So for instance a Twitter, Facebook, and a TERENA
account can be merged, so that the SP (in this case Sympa) will always
see "user 123".
There can obviously be multiple e-mail addresses for user 123.
We'd like to be able to use this identifier in Sympa, but it seems
that this is not (yet) possible, because the entire software package
seems to be based around the concept of "e-mail address as
identifier".
This might have been a perfectly fine and logical design, but it
unfortunately means that it will not be possible to use it in
combination with IDM systems that don't have a very strict mapping
between user IDs and e-mail addresses.

Ideally Sympa should be changed to abstract the user ID from the
e-mail address. It should be able to use a custom identifier, which
can be mapped to e-mail addresses from an IDM system. For example, a
list subscription would be for '123', 'visser1973-terena', or
'aWpJMGZ6UXNTRU83SUR2cF', instead of 'address@concealed'. A mapping
could look like:

123 -> address@concealed, address@concealed, address@concealed

A message from any of these addresses should be taken into account
when doing authorisation for posting to lists etc.

I realise that this change isn't trivial, but nevertheless it would
make Sympa usable for more organisations.
Especially given the fact that more and more organisations want to
integrate some sort of system to link their institution accounts to
'social accounts'.


Dick




-- 
Dick Visser
System & Networking Engineer
TERENA Secretariat
Singel 468 D, 1017 AW Amsterdam
The Netherlands