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Subsections

1. Presentation

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.

1.1 License

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.

1.2 Features

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:

1.3 Project directions

Future developpement should introduce:

1.4 History

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.

1.5 Authors and credits

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:

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 :

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.


next up previous contents index
Next: 2. Overview, what is it made Up: Sympa Mailing Lists Management Software Previous: Contents   Contents   Index
root 2000-12-14