Depuis l'annonce de l'intégration du CRU à RENATER, des utilisateurs nous posent régulièrement la question du devenir de Sympa dans cette nouvelle organisation.

Qu'ils se rassurent : La pérennité du projet est assurée et les ressources allouées en terme de développement et de support maintenues. Ajoutons que l'activité croissante de contributeurs, notamment internationaux, tendrait même ces derniers temps à dynamiser le projet.

Vos serveurs de listes pourront donc rester Sympa avec vous à l'avenir.

Les auteurs.

August 25, 2011

Check the release notes

This release includes bug fixes.

July 20, 2011

This release includes bug fixes.

June 6, 2011

This release includes several bug fixes and a slight change in our single SSO connector.

As usual, the Sympa translators have been very active on the project. Especially, we saw several improvments in the following translations:

• Polish (M. Woloszyn)
• Japanese (S. Ikeda)
• German (J. Krehbiel-Graether)

January 21, 2011

• Download sympa-6.1.4.tar.gz
• Check the release notes

This release includes a lot of bug fixes. Some improvments, too: Increased reliability of the sympa startup script, improved informations on some pages and service mails.

There was also a big deal of work on the Sympa internationalisation, as shows the list below:

• Swedish (P. Freyhult)
• Russian (S. Dukachev)
• Polish (M. Woloszyn)
• Japanese (S. Ikeda)
• Estonian (U. Buhvestov)
• Hungarian (A. Bendszak)
• German (J. Krehbiel-Graether)
• Catalan (J. Giralt Baldellou)

This new version owes a lot to the many users who gave us feedback, patches, and suggestions of improvments.

Thanks a lot to you all for helping us, every day, making Sympa better.

• http://pootle.sympa.org/

We've upgraded our pootle server; the web interface is much faster and therefore useable. The pootle web interface is an easy way for translators to quickly contribute to the translation effort of Sympa GUI.

November 15, 2010

• Download sympa-6.1.3.tar.gz
• Check the release notes

This release includes mainly bug fixes.

November 5, 2010 - Bug fixes

October 14, 2010 The CRU is pleased to deliver Sympa 6.1.1 to the open source community. Sympa 6.1.1 is the result of more than one year of project activity and proposes several new interesting features. This version includes a lot of new features, security enhancement and bug fixes.

Sympa 6.1.1 include a lot of fixes and internal chances to make the server more secure. Now XSS, CSRF or even brut force attack are much more difficult to perform against 6.1.1 servers.

[developed by Julien Jourdan]

It is now possible to customize messages content with data specific to each subscriber.

The custom attributes are defined as TT2 parameters in distributed messages. This allows to add unsubscription URL to message footers. Mail merge is controlled by a list/robot parameter : merge_feature on|off

Sympa now supports DKIM for message sending and for access control. DKIM is an important tool for antispam but it will really become powerful when most messages received in your mailboxes will include a DKIM signature. That's why it is so important for mailing list servers to support the DKIM standard.

The DKIM features included in Sympa were developped with the financial support of Internet2. Listmasters who want to learn more about DKIM and mailing lists servers should read the IETF draft.

• DKIM processing on incoming messages: Authorization scenarios can now use DKIM. Turning on the dkim_feature configuration parameter will provide a new authentication level to the authorization scenario engine. Scenario evaluation for incoming messages with a valid DKIM signature (but no S/MIME signature) will be evaluated with authentication method “dkim”. So rules that use authentication method “smtp” will not match.
• DKIM processing on outgoing messages: you may want to make Sympa sign outgoing messages. Almost every aspect of DKIM signature behavior can be customized via Sympa configuration parameters. Please check the DKIM parameters section for further details. Note that each parameter can also be set for a given virtual robot; and most of them are available as list parameter.

• dkim_feature
• dkim_add_signature_to
• dkim_signature_apply_on
• dkim_private_key_path
• dkim_selector
• dkim_signer_domain
• dkim_signer_identity
• dkim_header_list

See the documentation for details.

• dkim_feature
• dkim_signature_apply_on
• dkim_parameters
  • private_key_path
  • selector
  • header_list
  • signer_domain
  • signer_identity

[developped by Julien Jourdan]

It is now possible to exclude members from lists, even if member is included through an external data source. Beware, that this feature is different from the blacklist. Exclusion makes sense when a list is based on external data sources; thanks to exclusion, a user can unsubscribe (or be removed by list owner) even though he should be included via an external data source. Users get into the exclusion table, through the standard unsubscribe / delete functions. They get off the exclusion table with the standard subscribe / add functions. New table 'exclusion_table' has been created.

[developped by Julien Jourdan]

Users can suspend their list reception. She is still registered as a subscriber but won't receive the mails. Reception can be indefinite or have a scheduled expiration date. The reception suspension can be managed for all subscriptions in a unique web interface.

The “complexWhich” SOAP method now includes subscribers information about bouncing state.

Most supported languages have seen their translation upgraded. Among them we can remark those languages who are approximately 100 % translated:

• Polish (thanks to M. Woloszyn)
• Japanese (thanks to S. Ikeda)
• Russian (thanks to Chernysh)
• German (thanks to M. Warkus)
• French (eh...)

In addition, M. Warkus did a great deal of work on Sympa typography: all the ponctuation signs are now included in the transaltion strings, so you can adapt the typography to whatever the best practices are in your language.

The format of the generic_sso paragraph in auth.conf was extended

Two new parameters :

• http_header_list : allows to explicitely list HTTP header fields that should be cached in sympa user_table.
• http_header_value_separator : user attributes may be multi-valued (including the user email address. This parameter defines the values separator; default is ';' (adapted for Shibboleth)

• spam_status message property is now evaluated from a scenario spam_status. This scenario accept ham, spam and unsure as result. This replace the antispam_header_name antispam_tag_header_spam_regexp
• Is is now possible to enable topics when the reception mode is 'mail', 'notice', 'not_me', 'txt', 'html' or 'urlize'. AuthCAS module used to be distributed with Sympa. Since Sympa 6, it is a standalone CPAN module. The module still has the same name, therefore old installed versions of the module need to be removed

June 14, 2010 - Fixing query troubles

This release fixes problems related to message sending preparation for some RDBMS.

June 07, 2010 - Fixing database creation problems

This release includes fixes related to database creation and DKIM.

June 03, 2010 - Fixing first problems in Sympa 6.1 beta.

This release includes the code necessary to unsubscription URL at the bottom of list messages.

The latest stabilization version of Sympa 6.0 is out now!

This release includes many bug fixes, amongst which one that caused messages to be sent two times.

This release includes, along with several bug fixes, updated translations for the following languages:

• German (M. Warkus),
• French (Sympa authors),
• Japanese (S. Ikeda),
• Russian (Chernysh),
• Polish (M. Woloszyn).

Thanks to the translators for their work!

The CRU is proud to bring you the first release of Sympa version 6, along with the first release of the Sympa virtual machine!

So these are the new versions available in the Sympa world:

• 6.0 is the new stable version. That means that all bug fixes will now apply to both Sympa 6.0 and 6.1 versions; support for the version 5.4 will be restricted to drastic - security - issues and gradually cease, support for 5.3 and older versions is finished.
• 6.1 will be the new unstable version of Sympa. It is in alpha test right now and will be open for beta test soon.

Please note that all the latest Sympa features will be presented during the Fall 2009 Internet2 Member Meeting.

• We will introduce the latest features during a side meeting
• We will also be able to speak about our experience in using Sympa as a group manager in virtual organizations.

Feel free to contact us during this event. We are really looking forward to meet Sympa users from the other side of the ocean!

New bulk.pl daemon installed with Sympa. This daemon is dedicated to mail distribution and allows to parallelize this process on a single server as well as on multiple servers. The main bulk.pl processes will automatically fork new processes, depending on the amount of messages left in the database. You can control this behavior with the parameters bulk_fork_threshold, bulk_max_count,bulk_fork_threshold.

Messages spool used by the bulk.pl daemon is stored in the database, in two tables :

• bulkspool_table : one entry per message
• bulkmailer_table : subset of receipients for each message

New associated sympa.conf parameters :

• bulk_fork_threshold : minimum number of packets in database before the bulk forks to increase sending rate
• bulk_max_count : max number of bulks that will run on the same server
• bulk_lazytime : number of seconds a slave bulk will remain running without processing a message before it spontaneously dies
• bulk_wait_to_fork : number of seconds a master bulk waits between two packets number checks
• sympa_packet_priority : default priority set to a packet to be sent by the bulk (for future use)
• pidfile_bulk : location of the daemon PID file

You can trigger messages distribution day and time. This can be set on a per-list basis.

Storage of configuration in database is on its way! The colors used in the web interface are now stored in database. This is our proff of concept, opening the way towards a full storage of configuration and spools in database. These features will be important to make Sympa redundant. the first visible effect of this feature is the Sympa GUI color editor : you just have to edit colors and save them to make your Sympa server even more beautiful!

[Olivier Lumineau, CRU] Fresh new web CSS for the web interface. Here is the list of changes in the web interface :

• New css.tt2
• A new Sympa logo
• New navigation menu through list admin menu and server admin menu
• Miscellaneous modifications in templates (list_admin_menu.tt2 not used anymore)

WARNING : if you customize your own templates you may notice some mess in the page layout. In such a case compare your templates with the new distributed version and report any difference to your own files...

Replace storage of password with encryption by md5 fingerprint. This make remind password impossible. So now a one time ticket table is created ticket are sent by email as an authentication token. Ticket can be used for lost password, create account, moderation request . It should be generalized to all operation that need a email chalenge.

Want to create a new list that really looks like that other one you own since a year? Just click on the “clone list” button and bam! your list is created with the axact same configuration as the original, safe for the owners.

Four new languages are now available by default in Sympa:

• Bokmal (B. C. Aasgaard)
• Polish (L. Zygmanski)
• Finn (J.P. Paloposki)
• Vietnamese (C. Siddall)

Thanks to the translators for their efforts!

• New propertie in object message : spam_status . This feature is used in modindex (listing of message awaiting moderation) to show message tagged as spam. Messages suspected as spam are not included into messages sent to list editor. 4 new related parameters :
  • antispam_feature default off
  • antispam_tag_header_name default X-Spam-Status
  • antispam_tag_header_spam_regexp default ^\s*Yes
  • antispam_tag_header_ham_regexp default ^\s*No

• Message moderation : [Peter Hart] Added a new function for the moderation of messages. Upon rejection of messages, personnalised messages can be created, saved and used to give more information as to why these messages were refused by the moderator.
• New verify_netmask scenario condition. [Peter Hart] exemple : verify_netmask('1.12.123.00/24') (changes in intanet scenarii are just comment because we don't have access to the local netmask of installation).
• Extended the ldap_alias_manager.pl [Roland Hopferwieser] It used template to create LDAP entries. Also added a simulation mode for debug purpose.

In order to help you test the latest Sympa features, we built a VMware machine on which Sympa and a Dokuwiki farm are installed. They are set up to work together. That means that you will be able, with a simple click to create a wiki associated to the list you want. That work was done by Gael Merlin, of CRU.

So once your VM is installed, you will have a blank Sympa server, ready to use and fully set up. you just need to provide basic network information to put it into action.

You can download your Sympa vmware server and get additional informations on the Sympa web site.

Enjoy!

Sympa 6 beta 2 released