On Wed, 30 Oct 2002, Greg Ward wrote:

...

What I'd really like to do is have lists EITHER populate in the normal file way OR populated from LDAP. I was thinking I might use an address like

Err, define "populate". Is this a one-time thing? Or do you want the list membership to always come from an LDAP lookup?

The latter. I help run a large educational campus, and we hold all accounts and groups in LDAP. These groups change membership over time, and I want to associate mailing lists with some of them. What I don't need is the headache of remembering to keep the memberships in sync.

If the former, I would just write a script that does the LDAP query and sets the list population from it. Use bin/add_members as an example.

If we absolutely must. It's what we do with DNS and DHCP. But I'd rather not. Just more code to maintain.

If the latter, why use Mailman at all? Why not just use an MTA that can lookup aliases using LDAP, and then send mail to that alias? I'm pretty sure both Exim and postfix can do that.

'Cos mailman does the [approve|reject|defer|discard] thing. And archives. And it deals with 'real' mailing lists (which we would die rather than lose).

Martin Whinnery *Assistant* Network Manager South Birmingham College

'Just the assistant'