[Mailman-Developers] Storing additional user data

[Donn Cave]

On Thursday, July 10, 2003, at 11:50 AM, Chris Boulter wrote:
...
> 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.

Right.  With luck.

>> 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.

I think that might be what I meant.  Say your site is zoo.org, and your 
ID in
your external system is "cboulter".  Set up a host y that references 
that
data, so mail to cboulter at y.zoo.org forwards to chris at jellybaby.net.
Use cboulter at y.zoo.org in Mailman.  Voila'. If that made sense, I 
suppose
you would already be doing it, but at any rate that was the idea.  I 
only
threw in "LDAP" to sound like I know what I'm talking about.

	Donn Cave, University Computing Services, University of Washington
	donn at u.washington.edu