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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 document management.
It also includes management functions which
would normally require a substantial amount of work (time-consuming
and costly for the list owner). These
functions include automatic management of subscription renewals,
list maintenance, and many others.
Sympa manages many different kinds of lists. It includes
a web interface for all list functions including management. It allows
a precise definition of each list feature, such as sender authorization,
the moderating process, etc. Sympa defines, for each feature of each list,
exactly who is authorized to perform the relevant operations, along with the
authentication method to be used. Currently, authentication can be based
on either an SMTP From header, a password, or an S/MIME signature.
Sympa is also able to extract electronic
addresses from an LDAP directory or SQL server, and include them
dynamically in a list.
Sympa manages the dispatching of messages, and makes it possible to
reduce the load on the computer system where it is installed. In
configurations with sufficient memory, Sympa is especially well
adapted to handling large lists: for a list of 20,000 subscribers, it requires
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 server with Linux).
This guide covers the installation, configuration and management of
the current release (2.7) of
sympa.
Sympa is 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 provides all the basic features that any mailing list management robot
should include. While most Sympa features have their equivalents in other
mailing list applications, Sympa is unique in including features
in a single software package, including:
- High speed distribution processing and load control. Sympa
can be tuned to allow the system administrator to control
the amount of computer resources used. Its optimized algorithm
allows:
- the use of your preferred SMTP engine, e.g.
sendmail, qmail or postfix
- tuning of the maximum number of SMTP child processes
- grouping of messages according to recipients' domains,
and tuning of the grouping factor
- detailed logging
- Multilingual messages. The current version of
Sympa allows the administrator to choose the language
catalog at run time. At the present time the Sympa robot is available in
Chinese (Big5 and GB), Czech, English, Finnish, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Polish,
Portuguese, Spanish. The web interface is available in English, Spanish
and French.
- MIME support. Sympa naturally respects
MIME in the distribution process, and in addition
allows list owners to configure their lists with
welcome, goodbye and other predefined messages using complex
MIME structures. For example, a welcome message can be
in multipart/alternative format, using text/html,
audio/x-wav :-), or whatever (Note that Sympa
commands in multipart messages are successfully processed, provided that
one part is text/plain ).
- The sending process is controlled on a per-list basis.
The list definition allows a number of different actions for
each incoming message. A private list is a list where
only subscribers can send messages. A list configured using
privateoreditorkey mode accepts incoming messages
from subscribers, but will forward any other (i.e. non-subscriber) message
to the editor with a one-time secret numeric key that will be used by the
editor to reject or distribute it.
For details about the different sending modes, refer to the
send parameter (13.3.8, page
). The sending process configuration (as well as most other list
operations) is defined using a scenario. Any listmaster
can define new scenarios (scenarii) in order to complement the 20
predefined configurations included in the distribution.
Example : forward multipart messages to the list editor, while
distributing others without requiring any further authorization.
- Privileged operations can be performed by list editors or
list owners (or any other user category), as defined in the list
config file or by
the robot administrator, the listmaster, defined
in the /etc/sympa.conf global configuration file (listmaster
can also be defined for a particular virtual robot).
Privileged operations include the usual ADD, DELETE or REVIEW commands, which can be
authenticated via a one-time password or an S/MIME signature.
Any list owner using the EXPIRE
command can require the renewal of subscriptions. This is made
possible by the presence of a subscription date stored in the
Sympa database.
- full virtual robot definition : one real Sympa installation
can provide multiple virtual robots with both email and web interface
customization.
- E-mail addresses can be retrieved dynamically from a database
accepting SQL queries, or from an LDAP directory. In the interest
of reasonable response times, Sympa retains the data source in an
internal cache controlled by a TTL (Time To Live) parameter.
- Inclusion of the subscribers of one list among the subscribers of
another. This is real inclusion, not the dirty, multi-level cascading
one might otherwise obtain by simply "subscribing list B to list A".
- The internal subscriber data structure can be stored in a
database or, for compatibility with versions 1.x, in text
files. The introduction of databases came out of 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).
- Various task automatic processing. List master may use predefined
task models to automate recurrent processings such as regurlaly
reminding subscribers their belonging to a list or updating certificate
revocation lists. It is also possible to write one's own task models to meet
particular needs. Unique actions may also be scheduled by this way.
- WWSympa is a global Web interface to all Sympa functions
(including administration). It provides :
- classification of lists, along with a search index
- access control to all functions, including the list of lists
(which makes WWSympa particularly well suited to be the main
groupware tool within an intranet)
- management of shared documents (download, upload, specific
access control for each document)
- an HTML document presenting each user with the list of
her current subscriptions, including access to archives, and
subscription options
- management tools for list managers (bounce processing, changing of
list parameters, moderating incoming messages)
- tools for the robot administrator (list creation, global robot
configuration)
Sympa is a very activ project : check the release note
release note.
So it is no longer possible to
maintain multiple document about Sympa project direction.
Please refer to in-the-futur document
for information about project direction.
Sympa development started from scratch in 1995. The goal was to
ensure continuity with the TULP list manager, produced
partly by the initial author of Sympa: Christophe Wolfhugel.
New features were required, which the TULP code was just not up to
handling. The initial version of Sympa brought authentication,
the flexible management of commands, high performances in internal
data access, and object oriented code for easy code maintenance.
It took nearly two years to produce the first market releases.
Christophe Wolfhugel is the author of the first beta version of
Sympa. He developed it while working for the
Institut Pasteur.
Later developments have mainly been driven by the
Comité Réseaux des Universités
(Olivier Salaün and Serge Aumont), who look after a large mailing
list service.
Our thanks to all contributors, including:
- Pierre David, who in addition to his help and suggestions
in developing the code, participated more than actively in
producing this manual.
- 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
the 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
- Anonymous critics 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.
We ask all those we have forgotten to thank to accept our apologies
and to let us know, so that we can correct this error in future
releases of this documentation.
1.6 Mailing lists 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 announcements
- sympa-dev@cru.fr, Sympa developers
- sympa-translation@cru.fr, Sympa translators
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 consult the Sympa home page,
you will find the latest version, FAQ
and so on.
Next: 2. what does Sympa consist of
Up: Sympa Mailing Lists Management Software
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2001-11-16