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Sympa is an electronic mailing list manager. It is used to automate
list management functions such as subscription, moderation,
archive and shared documents management.
It also includes management functions which
would normally require a high quantity of work that may be time
consumming and costly for the list owner. Examples of these
functions include automatic management of subscription renewals,
list maintenance ...
Sympa is designed to manage many different kind of lists. It includes
a web interface for all list function including management. It allows
fine definition of each list feature such as sender autorisation,
moderating process, etc. Sympa is designed to define for each list
and for each feature on the list who can perform the
operation and which method is used to authenticate this personn. Currently
the authentication available method can be based either on the smtp From
header, a password, or S/MIME signature.
Sympa is also able extract electronic
addresses from an LDAP directory or any SQL server and include them
dynamically in a list.
Sympa manages sending of messages to the lists, e.g. their
routing up to the destination, and therefore makes it possible to
reduce the load on the computer system hosting Sympa. In
configurations that have enough memory, Sympa is especially well
adapted for large lists: for a 20,000 subscribers list, it takes
less than 6 minutes to send a message to 95 percent of the subscribers,
assuming that the network is available (tested on a 300 MHz, 256 MB
i386 serveur with Linux).
This guide covers installation, configuration and management of
the current release (2.7) of
sympa.
Sympa is a free software, you may distribute it under the terms
of the
GNU General Public License Version 2
You may make and give away verbatim copies of the source form of
this package without restriction, provided that you duplicate all
of the original copyright notices and associated disclaimers.
Sympa provide all the basic features that any mailing list management robot
should include. Most Sympa features have equivalent into different
software, but Sympa provides all of thoses features
into a single software, including:
- High speed distribution process and load control. Sympa
can be tuned to allow the system administrator to control
the amount of computer resources used. Its algorithm
is optimized:
- use of your prefered SMTP engine, e.g.
sendmail, qmail or postfix.
- tune the maximum number of SMTP child processes.
- sort email by domain and tune recipient grouping
factor (depending on repartion of subscriber's
domain)
- detailed logs.
- Multilingual messages. Current version of
Sympa allows the administrator to choose the language
catalog at run time. Currently, Sympa robot is available for
french, english, spanish, italian, german, finish and chinese
(Big5 and GB) languages (web interface is available
for french, english and spanish).
- MIME support. Of course, Sympa respects
MIME in the distribution process but also,
Sympa allows list owner to configure their list with
welcome, goodbye and other predefined messages using complex
MIME structure, e.g. welcome message can be
multipart/alternative using text/html,
audio/x-wav :-) or whatever (Note that Sympa
recognize commands in multipart messages as soon as one
part is text/plain ).
- The sending process is controlled per list.
The list definition allows many different actions for
each incomming message. A private list is a list where
only subscribers can send messages. A list configured using
privateoreditorkey mode accepts incoming messages
from subscribers, otherwise Sympa forwards it to the editor
with a one time secret numeric key that will be used by the
editor to reject or distribute the
message. For details about all sending modes, refer to the
send parameter (11.3.6, page
). The sending process configuration (as well as most other list
operation) is defined using a scenario. Any listmaster
can define new scenario in order to describe some configuration
different from the 20 predefined configuration distributed.
Exemple : forward multipart messages to the list editor and immediatly
distribute the others.
- Privileged operations can be performed by list editor or
list owner (or any other user category) as defined in list
config file or by
the robot administrator: listmaster defined
in the /etc/sympa.conf global configuration file.
Those operation are the usual ADD, DELETE or REVIEW commands which can be
authentified using a one time password or using S/MIME signature.
Any list owner using EXPIRE
command can ask for renewal of subscriptions. This is made
possible thanks to the subscription date stored in the
Sympa database.
- Dynamically include electronic addresses from a source
that can be either a database accepting SQL queries or an
LDAP directory. Sympa keeps in his cache the data source
using a TTL (Time To Live) parameter for reasonable response
delays.
- Include lists subscriber set in one list. This is a real
inclusion, not a dirty subscribtion a lists to a list.
- Internal subscriber data structure can be stored in a
database or, for compatibility with versions 1.x, in text
files. The choice of using a database was driven by the
WWSympa project. The database ensures a secure access to
shared data. The perl database API dbi/dbd enables
interoperability with various RDBMS (MySQL, PostgreSQL,
Oracle, Sybase).
- WWSympa is a global Web interface to all Sympa functions
(including administration). It supplies :
- classification of lists, search index
- access controle to all functions including to the list of lists
so WWsympa is particulary adpated to be the main groupware tool
of a intranet
- management of list shared documents (download, upload, specific
access control for each document)
- to each user, an HTML document presenting his current
subscriptions including access to archives, subscription options
- to list owners, list management tools (bounce processing, edition of
list parameters, moderation of incoming messages
- to robot administrators, list creation, global robot
configuration
Future developpement should introduce:
- Virtual robot definition, ISP would appreciate the
equivalent of Apache
virtual server feature applied to mailing lists.
- Additional groupeware features such as calendar, scenari editor...
- Pluggin commercial antivirus
- Subscriber preference for multipart/alternative messages reception.
Some news paper publish both text/plain and text/html version of
there mails. It should be nice to provide a sungle list for both format.
Sympa developement started from scratch in 1995. The goal was to
ensure continuity for the TULP list manager, produced
partly by the initial author of Sympa: Christophe Wolfhugel.
New functionalities were required, but for which the code of TULP
was no more adequate to continue its life cycle. Sympa initial
version brings authentication, flexible management of commands,
high performances in internal data access and object oriented code
for easy code maintenance.
It took nearly two years to come out with the first market releases.
Christophe Wolfhugel is the author of the first beta version of
Sympa, this work was performed while he was working for the
Institut Pasteur.
Later developments are mainly driven by the
Comité Réseaux des Universités
(Olivier Salaün and Serge Aumont) in charge of a large mailing
list service.
We would like to thank contributors, among which:
- Pierre David, who in addition to his help and suggestions
in developing the code, participated more than actively in
the manual that you have in your hands.
- Ollivier Robert, Usenet Canal Historique and the good manners
guru in the Perl program.
- Raphaël Hertzog (debian) and Stéphane Poirey (redhat) for
Linux packages.
- Olivier Lacroix for all his perseverance in bug fixing.
- Fabien Marquois who introduced many new features such as
digest.
- Alex Nappa and Josep Roman for their spanish translations
- Carsten Clasohm and Jens-Uwe Gaspar for their german translations
- Marco Ferrante for his italian translations
- Hubert Ulliac for search in archive base on marcsearch.pm
- Tung Siu Fai for his chinese translations
- and also: Manuel Valente, Dominique ROUSSEAU,
Laurent Ghys, Francois Petillon, Guy Brand, Jean Brange, Fabrice
Gaillard, Hervé Maza
- Persuaded anonymous ones who never missed a chance to
remind us that smartlist already did all that
better.
- All contributors and beta-testers cited in the RELEASE_NOTES file who by serving as guinea pigs and
being the first to use it, made it possible to quickly and
efficiently debug the Sympa software.
- Bernard Barbier, without whom Sympa would not
have a name.
May those people we have forgotten to thank accept our apologies
and make us aware of it so that we can correct this error in future
releases of this documentation.
1.6 Mailing list and support
If you wish to contact the authors of Sympa, please use the address
sympa-authors@cru.fr.
There are also a few mailing-lists about Sympa
:
- sympa-users@cru.fr general info list
- sympa-fr@cru.fr, for french-speaking users
- sympa-announce@cru.fr, Sympa announces
- sympa-dev@cru.fr, Sympa developpers
To join, send the following message to sympa@cru.fr:
subscribe Listname Firstname Name
(replace Listname, Firstname and Name by the list name, your first name and your family name).
You may also have a look at the Sympa home page,
you will find the upto date version, FAQ
and so on.
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2000-11-23