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Sympa is an electronic mailing list manager. It is used to automate
list management functions such as subscription, moderation and
archive 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 and user authentification for some commands.
Sympa is designed to manage many different kind of lists, it allows
fine definition of each list feature such as sender autorisation,
moderating process, etc. Sympa is also able extract electronic
addresses from an LDAP directory or any SQL server and include them
dynamically in a list.
Sympa also 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 (2.2.5) of
sympa.
Sympa is a free software, you may distribute it under the terms
of either the
GNU General Public License Version 2
or the
Artistic License.
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 is availible with
french, english and spanish languages.
- 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.
- The sending process is controlled per list.
The list definition allows many 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, 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 (3.3.10, page
).
- Privileged operations can be performed by list editor or
list owner 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. 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.
32
- 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
World Wide Sympa project. The database ensures a secure access to
shared data. The perl database API dbi/dbd enables
interoperability with various RDBMS (MySQL, PostgreSQL,
Oracle, Ingres
).
Future developpement should introduce:
Sympa development 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 for the spanish NLS catalog.
- and also: Manuel Valente, Dominique ROUSSEAU,
Laurent Ghys, Francois Petillon, Guy Brand, Jean Brange, Fabrice
Gaillard,
- Persuaded anonymous ones who never missed a chance to
remind us that smartlist already did all that
better; they did not manage to dampen my spirit.
- 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
If you wish to contact the authors of Sympa, please use the address
.
There is also a mailing-list about the Sympa product: .
Archives of this list
are available.
To join, send the following message to :
subscribe sympa-users Firstname Name
(replace Firstname and Name by your first name
and your family name).
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1999-10-21