The mailing list for listmasters using Sympa

["Tomaschewski-Walser Doris (ID SDL)" <address@concealed>]

> Can Sympa do hierarchical lists? I make an example:
>
> IT Department
>     Services
>        Security
>        Network
>        Hosting
>        Software
>           Mailinglists
>           Event management
>           ...
> Research
> Administration
>
> If people subscribe to the Mailinglists-list, they get only the messages 
> from the Mailinglists-list.
> If people subscribe to the Software-list, they get all the messages from 
> the Software-list and additionally of those lists below the Software list.
> If people subscribe to the IT Department-list, they get all the messages 
> from the Software-list and additionally of those lists below the IT 
> Department-list.
>
> Are such hierarchical lists possible with Sympa 6.2 ? I'd be happy.



(Answer by David VERDIN via RT [address@concealed])

Not yet. This is a first time feature request for us. You can add them
to the feature requests here:
https://sourcesup.renater.fr/tracker/?atid=170&group_id=23&func=browse

Though there could be workarounds...
*
*You can use the include_list parameter. Here is a proposed short term
solution using only Sympa mechanisms:

The MailingLists-list should contain the following parameter:

include_list Software-list

This way, people subscribed to the Software-list will be automatically
subscribed to the Mailinglists-list and will therefore receive mails
from both lists.

The inclusion is recursive. If the Software-list contains the following
parameter:

include_list Services

The people subscribed to the Services-list mailing list will receive
mails from the Software-list and Mailinglists-list mailing lists.

The only drawback is that lists synchronization is not recursive: when
you send a mail to Mailinglists-list, it triggers an update of the
subscribers soming from the software-list mailing list. But it will not
trigger the sync from the Services-list.
With such a setting, you then need to setup the lists to make regular
update frequently, so that newly subscribers to the Services-list will
reveive mails from the lowest levels soon after being subscribed. This
is donc using the ttl parameter. Setting it to 300, for example, will
trigger sync any 5 minutes. That can overkill though. Most people are
happy with one hour.