I'm hoping to use Mailman, but have a few requirements which may not be
addressed 'out of the box'. In particular, I'm integrating with another
system and would like to store the foreign system's user IDs in Mailman so
that I can correlate our users with Mailman subscribers. This will then
allow us to do things like replicate changes to users' email addresses,
which they currently enter in the foreign system.
I've considered using clone_member from the command line, but this seems
like it might not be problem-free. For instance, a user could change his
email address to match someone else's who's already subscribed to one or
more lists, and then change it back, and thus hijack that user's identity
(identifying only be email address, the users would become indistinguishable
to us).
Right. You need an extra database, user-id :: list :: role :: mailman-id (maybe you
wouldn't need "role", we do because our external IDs authenticate also.)
Does Mailman support the storage of any sort of user metadata? If not, would
it be easyish to add? I'm not terribly familiar with Python, but it looks
like I could add attributes to a class and then have them persisted by
Python's 'marshalling' into a (non-standard) Mailman database.
It isn't easyish to add. There are a boat-load of places where that extra user-ID
needs to be carried around and accounted for in various ways. I think in the
long run there will be enough interest in this that we'll see some support for it
in Mailman, but at best I imagine it's a long way off.
In your case, I'm wondering if some arrangement could be made so that email
delivery unifies everything with "the foreign system", and your user just uses
that ID as an email address. Put the final destination address in an LDAP
database and have sendmail look it up. No changes to Mailman. Or is that
what you're doing already? Well, anyway, without some real Python expertise
I think you're better off working around Mailman than trying to make this kind
of change to it.
Donn Cave, University Computing Services, University of Washington
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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