The mailing list for listmasters using Sympa

[Steve Shipway <address@concealed>]

I think this is a common situation at larger universities -- people having a 
'departmental' email address, and an 'insitiutional' one, probably with one 
forwarding to the other but mail could potentially come from either.

Here, we have 3 accounts or more a piece, though there is a 'primary' email 
registered for each account in our SSO system.  We get around it by having 
our central email gateway transparently masquerade the secondary accounts to 
the primary, so whenever Sympa sees an email from me, whichever account I 
sent if from, it always has a From address of my primary email account.  
People who log in using SSO get mapped to their Primary email for 
identification via an LDAP lookup (ironically our SSO returns all the user's 
email addresses in the metadata but does not identify the Primary)

I think this problem is baked into Sympa too deeply -- the whole design 
centers around the email address being the primary identifier.  This is 
understandable as you can have anonymous users, or users not authenticated 
via the SSO system, and so the email address remains the only thing available 
to use.   Despite some sites wanting to have a 'no anonymous or external 
users' setup, many sites (including ours) need to allow this.

One work around in the future may be to add an 'email mappings' table, 
probably automatically populated via the SSO metadata where  possible, to map 
secondary email addresses to primary for authentication purposes, and when 
listing individuals' subscriptions, etc.  This would be likely a vary large 
amount of work though.  Another solution would be to have an internal user 
database that periodically synchs with an external directory (LDAP?) and in 
addition has locally-generated users; however this would be a massive change 
to Sympa's internals and likely too difficult to make a change to.

Steve

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