[Mailman-Developers] Re: Storing additional user data

[Charlie Clark]

On 2003-07-10 at 18:00:07 [+0200], mailman-developers-request at python.org 
wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> 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).
> 
> 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.

Any kind of cloning is bound to cause problems sooner or later.
One thing would be to replace the Mailman database backend with another one 
and integrate via that. MembershipAdaptor makes this possible but you 
should be able to code in Python to do this. We've recently done this as 
have others, I believe.

One think you might try is integrating Mailman with something like Zope and 
XUF which you can then use to integrate users. Just an idea.

Charlie