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Sympa Mailing List Manager Virtual Host Configuration

As part of our work preparing for the EC Framework Programme N4C project, we have deployed the Sympa mailing list manager.   The system is highly capable, and very useful for our purposes.  However, starting from scratch to produce a somewhat unusal configuration with some enhancements proved 'interesting'.  The experiences have been documented since a number of other people seem to have been struggling with similar problems.

Sympa was installed primarily to provide mailing list service for a domain that is not the primary domain of the server.  This required the coordination of three pieces of configuration:
  • Apache virtual host with Fast CGI support for the Sympa user interface script
  • Postfix virtual alias domain using precise virtual aliases created by Sympa and virtual transports to post messages to the Sympa robot
  • Sympa web interface writing novel virtual alias regular espressions specific to each new mailing list to robot specific virtual alias files
While the Sympa documentation provides outlines for what has to be done for each of these tasks, it was discovered that there wasn't a document that explained the whole process in one place.  There was also a struggle with the mechnisms proposed to handle the connection between Postfix and Sympa.  Eventually the conclusion was that the Postfix FAQ documents on the Sympa web site do not provide a good working solution to the problem.  The main document provides a description of the solution adopted.  The modified source code for Sympa version 5.3.4 accompanies  this document together with a couple of files containing Postfix configurations for the transports used.

Documentation

Modified Sympa Source Code

This source code is derived from Sympa version 5.3.4.  The modifications have been applied to the distribution files rather than the installed files, so they should be ready to replace the equivalent files in the src directory of the distribution, except for the alias_manager.pl file which has an extra first line to stop the web server thinking it is a Perl script :-( - please remove before use!

Postfix Transport Configuration Files

Licence

Sympa is free software which is distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License Version 2. The code referenced on this page is a derivative work which is licenced on the same terms.  The 'Howto' document is also placed in the public domain and may be freely copied, distributed and modified.

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Last Updated: 4 April 2008


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