Sympa

Sympa is a scalable, open source, internationalized, free and highly customizable mailing list application implemented in Perl and engineered to handle big lists, with over 700,000 subscribers.

It offers a complete web-based interface for both the administrator and the end user. Sympa is one of the first S/MIME-enabled mailing list application, providing out-of-the-box support for both encryption and authentication.

It’s highly customizable and includes attractive features

Being highly customizable, the software will allow you to modify the mail and web templates, the authorization scenarios, as well as the authentication backends. Multiple backends can be used for dynamic mailing lists, including SQL, LDAP, lists, files, and many other data sources.

The software supports several authentication methods, including LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol), X509 and SSO (Single sign-on), supports DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM), and provides an easily customizable web-based interface.

In addition, the application comes with a web archive that offers message removal and access control, automatic bounce management support, virtual hosting support for service providers, as well as a SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) interface that allows you to integrate it with other apps.

Getting started with Sympa

To install and use the Sympa software on your GNU/Linux operating system, you must download the latest version from Softoware or via its official website by clicking the link at the end of the review. Save the archive on your PC, unpack it and open a terminal emulator app.

In the Terminal app, navigate to the location of the extracted archive files using the ‘cd’ command (e.g. cd /home/softoware/sympa-6.1.23), then run the ‘./configure && make’ command to configure and compile the program.

After a successful compilation process, run the ‘sudo make install’ command as a privileged user to install it system wide (alternatively, you can run the ‘make install’ command it you’re root).

What is new in this release:

• It fixes a potential security threat related to template editing along with several bugs.

What is new in version :

• Optimization for list search which, for very large server, could timeout and lead to an error on the web interface,
• Password strength validation when submitted by user,
• New, out-of-the-box DKIM-based scenarios,
• improvment for scenarios custom_conditions: custom_condition can now return the type of action to take: owner, request_auth, etc. This allows complex, single-module CustomConditions.

What is new in version 6.1.19:

• Changes:
• [10207] src/etc/script/create_db.Oracle, src/etc/script/create_db.Pg,
• src/etc/script/create_db.SQLite, src/etc/script/create_db.Sybase,
• src/etc/script/create_db.mysql: Two new database fields appeared in this version and a field was modified.
• The new fields are prev_id_session (varchar(30)) and refresh_date_session (int(11)). they are located in the session_table table.
• The modified field is dkim_privatekey_bulkspool and is located in the bulkspool_table table. Its length went from varchar(1000) to varchar(2000).
• Sympa install using MySQL and SQLite backends will have no trouble at all, as the database structure is updated by Sympa. However, if you use Postgres, Oracle or Sybase, please have a look (respectively) at the create_db.Pg, create_db.Oracle or create_db.Sybase to check the definition of those fields. Please update your database structure before running Sympa.
• [10206] src/lib/Sympa/DatabaseDescription.pm: Changing length of DKIM private key in database to ensure database creation scripts will be updated.
• Bug fixes:
• [10205] src/lib/Sympa/DatabaseDescription.pm: new session fields (prev_id_session and refresh_date_session) were not declared in DatabaseDescription.pm. Consequently, they were not used in create_db_script.* update.

What is new in version 6.1.5:

• Polish (M. Woloszyn)
• Japanese (S. Ikeda)
• German (J. Krehbiel-Graether)

What is new in version 6.1.4:

• This version includes a lot of bug fixes.
• Some improvments were also made.
• The reliability of the sympa startup script was increased.
• Information was improved on some pages and service mails.
• A lot of work was done on the internationalization support for Swedish, Russian, Polish, Japanese, Estonian, Hungarian, German, and Catalan.

What is new in version 6.1.3:

• Bug fixes:
• src/lib/confdef.pm, wwsympa/Auth.pm: [Reported by N. Matthies] Since ***** revision 6168, when a user logged in using LDAP with an email address, ***** if this address was returned by the LDAP server, the user was ***** authentified with this address. Some administrators prefer to force the ***** usage of canonical addresses. If you want to let userssubscribers use ***** the address they used logged in with, set the value of the new ***** wwsympa.fcgi parameter "ldap_force_canonical_email" to '0'. src/lib/List.pm, src/lib/PlainDigest.pm, src/lib/tools.pm, src/sympa_wizard.pl.in, wwsympa/Challenge.pm, wwsympa/SympaSession.pm: [#4452][C.Hastie, S.Ikeda] Issue: handling of different character sets in PlainDigest.pm was poor. Messages were assumed to be in ascii, iso-8859-1 or a closely related character set, and if they were not all characters above \x80 were dumped to provide crude, lossy iso-8859-1 output.updated PlainDigest.pm which normalises all parts to UTF-8. Cleanup from Soji : - don't bother trying to find path to lynx unless use_lynx is true - anchor content-type test strings to end of string to avoid picking up malformed headers as per bug 3702 - local Text::Wrap variables - moved repeated code to get charset into sub _getCharset - added use of MIME::Charset to check charset aliases src/lib/tools.pm: Fixing a rule problme with Stripscript. src/lib/Message.pm: Plain text message lost linebreaks in the web archives. This was due to the text/plain parts in mesasges were handled by Stripscript. Fixed by only handling test/html parts with Stripscripts. src/etc/script/create_db.mysql: [Reported by Sungmo Ahn] Fix createdb.mysql.

What is new in version 6.1:

• Many new features were added.
• It is now possible to customize message content with data specific to each subscriber.
• Sympa now supports DKIM for message sending and for access control.
• It is now possible to exclude members from lists, even if the member is included through an external data source.
• Users can temporarily suspend their list reception.
• The translations for most supported languages have been upgraded.
• The languages that are almost completely translated are Polish, Japanese, Russian, and German.