[Mailman-Developers] Storing additional user data

[Chris Boulter]

On Thu 2003-07-10 09:20:20 -0700, Donn Cave wrote:
> On Tuesday, July 8, 2003, at 06:19 AM, Chris Boulter wrote:
> >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.

Yes, I can imagine others might be also interested in storing data in
addition to subscribers' email addresses - having external system UIDs would
help with 'single sign-on' integration too, which I've seen discussed here.

> 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.

This sounds interesting. So you're suggesting that rather than storing
email addresses of subscribers in Mailman, we store our external system
UIDs, then have sendmail resolve those into email addresses just before the
mail gets sent? This sounds neat, but wouldn't it break other parts of
Mailman? Anything which compares the From address of an incoming email would
break, so that would probably screw with moderation among lots of other
things.

I'll carry on thinking about it, but we might be able to just enforce a
unique constraint on email addresses, so we know a given email address
always refers to a particular user in our external system.

Thanks for your help so far.

Chris

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