The mailing list for listmasters using Sympa

[Steve Shipway <address@concealed>]

On Mon, 2018-05-07 at 01:19 -0400, Mark London wrote:

> Steve  - Thanks for the info.   I am trying to avoid using LDAP, because 
> Sympa itself is already based on a database, and I would like to have a 
> self contained site.  Plus, I've spent decades hating LDAP. :)
>
> Regarding the 2nd option that you used, i.e. "Let everyone access the 
> Sympa website, but the visibility scenario all say they must be on the 
> list.  Therefore they see nothing until they have logged in with a valid 
> identity", and "this allowed us to have a small number of public lists 
> but most require login to access or see."
>
> If understand this correctly, it appears that most of your mailing lists 
> were set to be invisible, unless the person was subscribed to that 
> list.   Wouldn't that require me having to manually subscribe people to 
> those lists?   I'm trying to avoid doing this.   I want to restrict 
> access to my site, but I want people with login access,  to be able to 
> easily subscribe or unsubscribe themselves to my mailing list, without 
> my intervention.

Most of our mailing lists were set to invisible, unless the user was a member of a special central list (the 'staff' list).  Although mailing lists don't need to be visible to be subscribed to...  This allowed us to delegate management of the list used for authorisation to other people without having to hand over listmaster rights to anyone.

You can set the 'subscribe' scenario and 'visibility' scenario for your lists to be one which requires your user to be logged in, and to be a member of the special private sympa list.  Then, you just need to add them to that list, and immediately all the other lists will become visible and subscribeable.

This would mean that anyone can log in, but they can't see anything unless they're on the special list.

If you inherit authentication from your web server, then you could potentially have that using auth_mysql (or similar) to authenticate against the Sympa database, and to run a query that ensures membership in the special list, though I am not able to give you the exact settings.

If you're not using LDAP, then I would be inclined to let everyone log in, but use the Sympa visibility scenario to restrict things, rather than try to restrict things at webserver login time.

Steve

>

--

Steve Shipway | Senior Email Systems Administrator 
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