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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 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.

1.1 License

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.

1.2 Features

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:

1.3 Project directions

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.

1.4 History

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.

1.5 Authors and credits

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:

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 :

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 up previous contents index
Next: 2. what does Sympa consist of Up: Sympa Mailing Lists Management Software Previous: Contents   Contents   Index
root 2001-11-16