This is an old revision of the document!


Sympa 6.1.22 released

June 6, 2014

RENATER is proud to release the newest version of Sympa to the open-source community.

Sympa 6.1.22 is the latest stable version of Sympa.

This release includes mainly bug fixes.

This is the release that fixes the DMARC issues related to the recent DMARC policy change from yahoo, aol and others and solved by Steve Shipway. All details about can be found on the Sympa DMARC page.

[Submitted by S. Shipway, Univ. of Auckland] Workaround for aggressive DMARC policy such as yahoo.com. The patch adds option #3 of this DMARC FAQ: http://dmarc.org/faq.html#s_3 - New list config paragraph “dmarc_protection” to munge “From:” header and put original header content erc. into comment.

New parameters for merged messages. “part.description”, “part.disposition”, “part.encoding” and “part.type” may be used for each part of input messages. These are all-lowercase (except “part.description”).

  • [Fixed by V. Bonamy, univ. Rouen] When usingUTF-8 encoded data, data were twice encoded before being sent by the SOAP server. Fixed by decoding from UTF-8 any text data.
  • Scenarios were not evaluated for DKIM authlevel, because DKIM signature was found invalifd. This was due - again - by the usage of MIME::Entity::as_string to store the message as string. Fixed by simply storing the raw data from message file instead vof using this sub.
  • When using DKIM, both DKIM and S/MIME signatures were broken. This was due to the usage of MIME::Entity→as_string that rewrapped the message body to 60 columns - thus changing the character string of the message body and probably also the \015\12 end of line required to get valid DKIM signatures. Fixed by storing the message body fed to Mail::DKIM and concatenating it to the new headers containing the DKIM signature.
  • DKIM parameters were not correctly loaded and dkim_signer_domain parameter was not correctly defaulted to the list service domain.
  • When using binary cache for list configs, if the main config (sympa.conf or wwsympa.conf) was changed, binary cache were still used. Problem: These bainary cache contain default values taken from main config. If these values were changed in main config, they were not updated in binary cache. Fixed by testing the last modification time for sympa.conf and wwsympa.conf against the binary_cache last update time.
  • WWSympa may crash due to unknown subroutine when:
    1. Anonymous user accesses to $wwsympa_url/signoff/LIST/EMAIL, i.e. specifying email but not logging-in.
    2. User does not exist in user_table.

This causes because wwslib::init_passwd() called in wwsympa.fcgi doesn't have qualified name. Use qualified name and do fix another logical bug on unknown variable.

  • If cache_list_db is “on” and list_table is empty, all users in user_table except listmaster will be purged. To prevent information loss, made purge_user_table task not to use list_table cache.
  • [Reported by D Launay, RENATER] Signed mail body are altered. Fixed by making following functions not to alter such parts:
  1. Bulk::merge_msg()
  2. List::_append_parts()
  • [Originally submitted by M. Howe, Univ. of Oxford] Session for multiple robots sharing same cookie domain is broken. Fixed injected bug by fix for bug #6180: the sessions were limited to each virtual robot at the first access. The patch was modified a bit.

Sympa 6.1.20 released

March 21, 2014

RENATER is proud to release the newest version of Sympa to the open-source community.

Sympa 6.1.20 is the latest stable version of Sympa.

This release includes mainly bug fixes. The major one being a bug preventing alias creation when using virtual hosts.

Here is the list of fixes:

  • sympa_newaliases failed to update aliases for virtual hosts,
  • Message-ID field is no longer duplicated,
  • Distributed messages may have duplicate content of some header fields, i.e. Errors-To:, Precedence: and Sender: (and From: and Message-ID: when anonymous_sender is enabled). Several content filtering systems will take off the score for such messages. Make sure that the fields will be overwritten by List::distribute_msg().
  • Mail merge: Parameters taken from mail headers may be overwritten by ones of each subpart. Initialize $data→{'headers'} only once at calling Bulk::merge_msg(),
  • On rebuilt archives, src attributes of HTML elements may be removed. Because Message::clean_html() was given Message object of message without X-Sympa-To: pseudo header. Give robot argument to this method.
    • Following methods/functions require the argument of Robot object: Archive::clean_archived_message(), Archive::clean_archive_directory(), Message::clean_html(), tools::sanitize_html(), tools::sanitize_html_file() and tools::sanitize_var().
    • archived.pl: Now mhonarc will be given arguments with per-robot value of wwsympa_url parameter instead of site-default value.
  • [Reported by J. Moutinho] wwsympa: signoff crashes. wwsympa/signoff/somelistname dies with “Cannot quote a reference” error, since mail::mail_file() may take List object as 'list' item in $data argument. List along with HASH would be concerned.

The Sympa translators are more than ever active, as the following languages have been updated. Many thanks to our loyal translators! Please follow the links if your interested in improving these languages translations.

Sympa 6.1.19 released

February 5, 2014

RENATER is proud to release the newest version of Sympa to the open-source community.

Sympa 6.1.19 is the latest stable version of Sympa.

A large part of what is made available today is due to the hard work and dedication of Soji Ikeda. Let he be once again thanked for all his commits, improvements and suggestions: Thanks Soji! :-)

This release includes… See below!

  • Feature: Per-language css.tt2 will override any portion of main css, not fully replacing it. So they may be used for locale-specific customization. Background: Default css.tt2 specifies the font families covering Western scripts (Latin, Cyrillic, …). East Asian users may prefer consistent font family supporting Western along with Eastern scripts (Han, Hangul, …). Once sympa is installed, you will find these dedicated CSS in default/web_tt2/<locale>, where <locale> can be “ja_JP”, “ko_KR”, “zh_CN” and “zh_TW”.
  • Change: Now alias maintenance utilities other than newaliases may be used without special configure options nor patch to alias_manager.pl. Changes:
    • aliaswrapper and virtualwrapper were deprecated and replaced with sympa_newaliases-wrapper.
    • New alias management program sympa_newaliases.pl which will typically be called by alias_manager.pl via sympa_newaliases-wrapper.
    • New site configuration parameters aliases_db_type and aliases_program will control behaviour of alias database maintenance.
    • configure script:
    • Options --with-sendmail_aliases and --with-virtual_aliases were deprecated. Use --with-aliases_file instead.
    • New options --with-makemap and --with-postalias, along with options --with-newaliases and --with-postmap are available.
    • Option --with-postmap_arg was removed.
    • Alias managers can handle postmap/makemap style maps (delimited by whitespace), not only newaliases style maps (delimited by colon).
  • Change: wwsympa: Non-privileged users can access to some restricted functions.
    • Any users can access to skinsedit function and execute it.
    • The remove_template function won't check argument. These are due to typos in some tables (hashes) defining functions. In addition, there are a few ineffective definitions in the tables.
  • Bug fix: [#6180][#6979][#7079][#8056] Web session would be broken by nearly simultaneous multiple HTTP requests, such as browsing an archive page with a few images.
    • Database change is needed: two new fields were added to session_table: prev_id_session (varchar(30)) and refresh_date_session (int(11))?. As usual, MySQL and SQLite will be automatically updated. Postgres, Oracle and Sybase users will need to manually edit their database structure.
    • Optional Crypt-CipherSaber is needed to use encrypted cookie feature. Fixes:
    • Made transition between session IDs not to occur on each access; they occur with interval specified by cookie_refresh parameter.
    • Made raw session ID not to be disposed to clients; encrypted IDs changed by each request are used for cookie values. The first point prevents session to be broken, while it slightly weakens against the replay attack. The second point keeps inpredictability of session cookies.
  • Feature: [Submitted by S. Shipway, univ. Auckland] When mail merge is activated, new parameters can be used, taken from the mail headers:
    • subject
    • x-originating-ip
    • message-id
    • date
    • x-original-to
    • from
    • to
    • thread-topic
    • content-type
  • Feature: New site config parameter “sender_headers” to specify header fields by which message sender is detected. This is a enhancement to S. Shipway's improvement.
  • Change: [Submitted by S. shipway, univ. Auckland] When Sympa receives a mail without 'From' field, it tries to find the sender by parsing the 'Envelope-From', 'X-Sender' and 'return-Path' fields before giving up and moving the message to bad.
  • Bug fix: Message::fix_html_part() breaks texts encoded by several charsets such as UTF-16. Convert parts always except their charset is UTF-8 or US-ASCII. Sympa may be crashed by the UTF-16 texts without BOM. It is due to a feature of Encode module. Update MIME-Charset to 1.010 to prevent crash. ToDo: Workaround for modules such as MHonArc, StripScripts not supporting UTF-16.
  • Bug fix: When sending a crypted message, it was possible that very few users would have provided their certificate to the list. In such a situation, if either all the the non VERP receipients array of receipients was empty, the message was not sent at all (the message distribution was stopped and the non VERP receipients were not distributed). Fixed by checking the number of receipients for each situation and issuing an info in the logs but without stopping the overall distribution.
  • Bug fix: [Reported by S. Shipway, univ. Auckland] When merge was activated on a list, Sympa would merge even signed messages. Signed messages should not be altered in any way, so merge is deactivated when such a message is sent to a list. Note that an alternate solution would be to remove the incoming signature and make the list sign the message, if it has a certificate. This solution should be investigated in later versions of Sympa.
  • Bug fix: When DKIM was activated, removing invalid DKIM signatures would break S/MIME signature.
  • Bug fix: When adding footers, nothing appeared in the mail received by subscribers in the following condition:
    • footer_type was set to “append”
    • the mail was multipart/html This was due to the footer being added to the text/plain part only. Now it is added to the text/teml part as well.
  • Bug fix: If merge_feature was on, whole or part of subscribers could be disposed by including “[% to %]” into messages. Fixed by removing 'receipients' item of bulk packets from the parameter passed to Bulk::merge_msg().
  • Feature: [Reported by so many listmasters we lost the count] Exclusion table was just a display of the users excluded. list owners could not do anything to restore subscriptions; This page is now a form, similar to the review page, which allows to restore users subscriptions.
  • Feature: [Submitted by S; shipway, univ. Auckland] Added quick access links in the review page to reach all users whose emails start with a given letter.
  • Bug fix: [#8684][Reported by D. Fournier, CNRS] In some cases, such as changing a user email address through the Sympa admin > Users web interface, the email value was not set in the “update” config paragraph, leading to logs stating: 'Missing key “email” in param “update” in…'.
  • Change: [Submitted by S. Shipway, univ. Auckland] several changes in privilegs to ease everyday lists moderation:
    • Owners and lismasters can moderate messages and shared repository
    • Editors can moderate subscriptions
    • 'del' and 'add' sceanrios are evaluated to make their result available in each page.
  • Bug fix: [Reported by M. Ferrante] Scenari: Inconsistent handling of header fields in rule conditions. New features:
    • “[msg_header→field][index]” returns the value of particular field. Index may be negative.
    • “[msg_header→field]” still returns list of field values, additionally, ordering will be preserved. Fixes:
    • Conditions is_listmaster, is_owner, is_editor and is_subscriber can handle multiple values.
    • They also parse arguments as header field values to get address parts.
  • Bug fix: Limit the header fields to be checked by scenarios.
    • In spam_status scenario, last occurrences of X-Spam-status and so on will be checked, since others are not trustworthy.
    • Also, the last X-sender field would be checked.
    • In send scenario, first occurrences of Content-Type and so on will be checked, since they must appear only at once.
  • Bug fix: [#7825] [Reported by D. Marant, Université Lille 1] spam_status scenario had no effect for messages sent to command addresses. Fixed a typo in sympa::DoCommand().
  • Bug fix: [#7526] [Submitted by Evili del Rio] SQL Filters always returned false. Though what SQLSource::fetch() returns may be arrayref of references to array of rows, it was treated as an arrayref of rows.
  • Feature: i18n of options for list parameters and subscriber options.
    • Options on edit_list page are shown by i18n'ed titles.
    • Only listmasters can view real config values.
    • Subscriber options on review pages, command results, subscriber option pages and so on are shown by i18n'ed titles (along with real option values).

This release also includes updated translations for the following languages. we will never thank enough the Sympa translators whose work is so valuable to help Sympa to spread around the world:

  • Basque (thanks to “Dabid”)
  • Catalan
  • Czech
  • English
  • Finnish (thanks to J.P. Paloposki)
  • French (RENATER team)
  • Galician (thanks to X. Mosquera)
  • German (thanks to R. Heider)
  • Italian
  • Japanese (thanks to Soji Ikeda)
  • Occitan (thanks to C. Valmary)
  • Portuguese (Brazil) (thanks to I. fontes Ferreira and “Gomex”)
  • Russian (thanks to S. Dukachev)
  • Spanish (thanks to A. Marin) Please note that Spanish translators have their own mailing list now: sympa-es@listes.renater.fr. You can subscribe to this list if you want to get involved in Sympa translation into Spanish.
  • Swedish (thanks to P. Freyhult and M. Amnefelt)
  • Turkish

Several translation projects were added since last release: Ido, Esperanto and Latin. If you want Sympa to be translated into your own language - and agree to do part of this yourself or with friends, just ask the Sympa authors. If you don't want to feel isolated, just do as Spanish translators did: ask us to create a dedicated mailing list for translators in your language.

  • Bug fix: [Reported by P. Aepli, univ. Genève] Multi-valued parameters obtained from Shibboleth IdP were badly parsed. This as due to the fact that Sympa stored additional parameters under the form: “key1=value1;key2=value2;etc.” As Shibboleth uses semi-columns to separate values in multivalued attributes, values were misinterpreted as new
    • empy
    • attributes. Fixed by separating keys and values by totally unlikely strings.
  • Feature: [Submitted by S. Shipway, univ. Auckland] ODBC is now supported for email data sources.
  • Bug fix: Too short DKIM database field. Expaned dkim_privatekey_spool from 1000 to 2000 o.
  • Bug fix: [debian#642464] [Originally submitted by E Bouthenot, Debian Project] Initial installation or upgrade with SQLite failed. cf. http://bugs.debian.org/642464
  • Change: Supplemental Unicode characters beyond BMP can't be used on MySQL. As of MySQL 5.5.3, text types supported UTF-8 characters with 4 octets (a.k.a. utf8mb4). By them, additional characters such as CJK ideographs used in persons' names can be used. Change: Try to set 'utf8mb4' then 'utf8' as client-side character set. Note:
    • Server also must enable utf8mb4, or supplemental characters will be ignored silently. Add “character-set-server=utf8mb4” line to my.cnf.
    • Tables must be defined with “DEFAULT CHARACTER SET utf8mb4” option, or run “ALTER TABLE” queries to change default character sets of preexisting tables.
  • Bug fix: MySQL: session charset is cleared. connect() sets “mysql_auto_reconnect” driver attribute to true when the processes are running under mod_perl or CGI environment so that ping() will always succeed and then “SET NAMES utf8” will be skipped. Fixed by resetting that attribute as soon as connect() succeeded.
  • Bug fix: [#8466][#8468][Initially Submitted by Marton J., Budapesti M?\197?\177szaki ?\195?\169s Gazdas?\195?\161gtudom?\195?\161nyi Egyetem] Oracle cannot handle messages as long type. * DBI::Oracle has a default setting of LongReadLen=80. As a result, driver does not fetch a record in bulkspool_table containing a long column that have value longer than 80 characters. * DBI::Oracle raises error if messages larger than approximately 2600 o (4000 o in base64 encoding) was sent. Fixes:
    • Original patch was for Sympa 6.0.1; it was rewritten for sympa-6.1-branch.
    • Set $dbh→{'LongReadLen'} to be max_size * 2.
    • Give SQL the messages as bound parameters to avoid long text literals.
    • Rewritten patch also includes support for Sybase which needs similar concern.
  • Bug fix: [#8628][Submitted by Marton J., Budapesti M?\197?\177szaki ?\195?\169s Gazdas?\195?\161gtudom?\195?\161nyi Egyetem] Inproper connection pool-handling: database user is not taken into account. Modified patch was applied.
  • Bug fix: [#8629][Submitted by Marton J., BME, Hungary] Oracle date writer formula was broken: after noon, 1 day is added.
  • Bug fix: [#8669] create_db.SQLite was not uptodate.
  • Bug fix: [#7459][Submitted by Mitar] Tables in PostgreSQL user schema are not detected during upgrade process.
  • Feature: Now you can define a “scenari” directory in the lists family directory. These scenarii will be available for lists instantiated from this family. The “scenari” directory must be put directly in the family directory, not in the overall “families” directory. For example, if you want to define scenarii specific to the “staff” family, you must define a scenari directory in the /home/sympa/etc/families/staff/ directory. Not in /home/sympa/etc/families/.
  • Feature: Now the list of files parsed (in addition to config.tt2) when instantiating a family are defined in a new (sympa.conf and robot.conf parameter called 'parsed_family_files'. This parameter must contain a comma-separated list of file names. If these files exist, with the '.tt2' extension in a family, they will be parsed and added to the list directory. The default value of the parameter is 'message.footer,message.header,message.footer.mime,message.header.mime,info'.
  • Change: Now 'message.footer','message.header','message.footer.mime','message.header.mime','info' files are updated in existing lists when a family is instantiated. note that it will overwrite any other customization.
  • Bug fix: In scenarios, the field [msg→spam_status] was never taken into account because the message objects fields were not made available to scenarios. Fixed by adding a new test in Scenario::request_action. Now any Message field can be accessed in scenarios.
  • Change: Custom vars values can take any character string as values (previously, spaces were forbidden).
  • Change: custom colors along with configured colors are shown during testing colors. Improved javascript.js:chooseColorNumber() to update position.
  • Bug fix: The “info.conceal” scenario was neither packaged nor installed.
  • Bug fix: Several fixes on style sheets (CCS).
    • Fixed broken css.tt2: Special characters were replaced by entities.
    • Tune metrics of some items so that pages may be shown properly by most of modern browsers.
    • Added some workaround for IE bugs, though they are not bugs of Sympa. Now IE 7 or later more or less correctly render. Note: IE 6 or earlier is not.
  • Bug fix: [#8712][Reported by L. Didry, CIRIL] In the main admin edition page, the database password was displayed as clear text. replaced by a series of stars.
  • Bug fix: [#8916][Reported by Adam Bernstein, Electric Embers] wwsympa/search: Date is not displayed in human readable form in “other similar subscribers” results. Format date and update_date fields in tt2 parameters.
  • Bug fix: [#8662][Reported by A. Bernstein, Electric Embers] wwsympa: arcsearch crashed on non-UTF-8 bytes in HTML, with error “Malformed UTF-8 character (fatal)”. Marc::Search uses Unicode internally to utilize case-insensitive match. Fixed by replacing “:utf8” input layer with “:encoding(utf8)”, since former won't really check inputs.
  • Bug fix: [#7318] Encoding problem on sympasoap. UTF-8 strings were encoded twice as latin-1 strings.
  • Change: In attribute values for ldap_2level_query, characters '\', '(', ')', '*' and 'null' (\0) are escaped
  • Bug fix: [Reported by F. Périchon] Users included from data sources can unsubscribe from a list provided the “unsusbscribe” scenario allows them. Unsubscription worked well, but when re-subscribing to the list, both the listmasters and the users received an error; this was because the user counter was not increased when re-including a subscriber. Fixed by changing the test and increase the counter when just removing someone from the exclusion table.
  • Bug fix: [Reported by Ö. Sahin, univ.Lyon 2] When List::new sub was called, sync_include_admin was systematically executed, except when specifically stated. If using a lot of owenr and editor datasources, this resulted in large amount of queries to these datasources when searching lists or displaying the list of lists. This is now modulated. When calling get_lists, calling sync_include_admin is now optional and executed if the limits of the 'ttl' and 'ditribution_ttl' parameters are not exceeded.
  • Bug fix: Some wwsympa.conf parameters were not defined in @confdef::params, and some were redundantly defined their defaults in wwslib::load_config(). Fixes:
    • These were added to @confdef::params: custom_archiver review_page_size viewlogs_page_size htmlarea_url
    • This was removed: robots (wwsympa.conf parameter)
    • Let wwslib::load_conf() get defaults from @confdef::params. More known bugs:
    • This inconsistently refers both wwsympa.conf and sympa.conf/robot.conf: arc_path
    • This refers sympa.conf/robot.conf by default and wwsympa.conf: cookie_domain
    • These refers sympa.conf/robot.conf, though they are defined as wwsympa.conf parameters: password_case title default_home ldap_force_canonical_email
  • Bug fix: tools::get_filename() has been ignoring symbolic links. Because “-r” file test operator returns false on symlinks. Expand symlink paths by Cwd::abs_path() then test them by -r. This will be a part of fixes for bug #7383.
  • Bug fix: [#7819] Creation of list is notified to super listmasters even if it belongs to virtual robot.
  • Bug fix: [#8711][Submitted by a nice anonymous contributor aka “Luke”] When using NFS lock, timeout and stale_lock_timeout were inverted and the timout value was increased.
  • Bug fix: [#8661][Reported by Y. Rouillard, INRA] Lock::remove_lock() doesn't properly destroy Lock object. Clear entire lock entry not only filehandle of it.
  • Bug fix: [#8650] pod2man fails with non-ASCII characters in POD. Partially backported from 6.2-branch: Use E<…> for non-ASCII letters so that POD sources contain only ASCII. In conjunction corrected several descriptions out-of-date.

Enjoy!

The Sympa developpers

Formations Sympa 2014

Voici le programme des formations en français pour 2014.

Attention : Ces formations, organisées par RENATER, tutelle du projet Sympa, sont réservées à la communauté Ensignement Supérieur / Recherche française. Nous allons faire de notre mieux, cette année, pour fournir d'autre modes de formations aux utilisateurs du logiciel n'appartenant pas à cette communauté.
  • les 29 et 30 janvier à l'université Paris Descartes. 12, rue de l’école de médecine Paris 6e – Salle St Germain basse.
  • 9h30 - 13h00 et 14h00 - 17h30
  • les 13 et 14 mai à l'université de Rennes 1. DSI - Université de Rennes 1 - Bât. 12D - Campus de Beaulieu - 263 avenue du Général Leclerc - premier étage, salle 102
  • 9h30 - 13h00 et 14h00 - 17h30

Public visé Taille : 20 personnes.

Profil :Des administrateurs actuels ou potentiels du logiciel Sympa appartenant à la communauté Enseignement supérieur / Recherche française. Le TP peut convenir à des personnes connaissant déjà le logiciel et désirant explorer des fonctionnalités plus avancées, ainsi qu'à des personnes désirant découvrir le logiciel et ses potentialités.

Pré-requis techniques :

  • Le public doit disposer de compétences techniques raisonnables en administration Unix, messagerie et web.
  • Il est nécessaire de disposer d'une boîte mail, professionnelle ou privée, capable de faire de la signature et de la vérification DKIM. Cette boîte mail doit être accessible par webmail.
  • Aucun matériel n'est nécessaire : les moyens matériels sont fournis (ordinateurs et serveurs). Il est possible d'amener son propre ordinateur si vous préférez disposer de votre environnement.

Formateurs : La formation est assurée par les auteurs du logiciel Sympa (Étienne Méléard et David Verdin).

  • Formation gratuite
  • Repas non fournis
  • Les stagiaires travaillent sur des machines virtuelles préinstallées. Bien que des postes de travail soient fournis, ils sont invités à venir avec un ordianteur portable muni d'un environnement avec lequl ils sont familiers, ce qui leur permet de disposer des outils qu'il connaissent. PAr ailleurs, un poste de travail susceptible de se connecter sur leur propre serveur de liste peut permettre des comparaisons en temps réel.

Journée 1

  1. Installation et configuration
  2. Architecture et organisation d'un serveur Sympa
  3. Concepts de base : rôles utilisateurs, création et configuration des listes
  4. La messagerie dans Sympa
  5. Les interfaces de Sympa (web, mail, ligne de commande et SOAP)
  6. Mécanismes d'autorisation : les scénarios
  7. Sources de données pour l'alimentation des listes

Journée 2

  1. Hôtes virtuels
  2. DKIM
  3. Authentification externe
  4. Personnalisation de Sympa : paramètres, le langage TT2, les éléments personnalisables
  5. Industrialisation de la gestion des listes : familles de listes et listes automatiques
  6. Fonctionnalités de messagerie avancées : VERP, tracking, personnalisation de messages, S/MIME
  7. Couplage Sympa - Dokuwiki

TERENA workshop

RENATER, TERENA and the Strasbourg university co-organize a one day workshop about Sympa.

This workshop'sintended audience are our colleagues from the European NREN.

See all details here: TERENA workshop

Sympa 6.1.17 released

February 5, 2013

Here is Sympa 6.1.17, the latest stable version of Sympa.

This release includes a fix for potential attempts to gather informations regarding hidden lists.

It also fixes several other bugs.

This release also includes updated translations for the following languages. we will never thank enough the Sympa translators whose work is so valuable to help Sympa to spread around the world:

  • Japanese
  • French
  • English
  • Occitan
  • Greek (kopolyzo)
  • Catalan
  • Dutch (kwadronaut)
  • German (L18N)
  • Spanish (almarin)
  • Chinese (China) (Hongquan)
  • Hungarian (poli12)
  • Russian

Sympa 6.1.16 released

November 16, 2012

This release includes two bug fixes. One that could make CAS authentication fail and the other one making digest composing fail and sympa being stalled.

These two bugs were reported - and for one of thme, fixed, thanks François - by the community.

It looks like a good place for a short reminder: the lists sympa-users@listes.renater.fr and sympa-fr@listes.renater.fr (French speaking) are the good places to report weird behaviours and to get help.

If you're sure you found a bug, please fill a bug request on our tracker: https://sourcesup.renater.fr/tracker/?group_id=23

So, in short, the 6.1.16 upgrade from 6.1.15 will be:

  • seamless as very little parts of the code moved;
  • useful.

This release also includes updated translations for the following languages. we will never thank enough the Sympa translators whose work is so valuable to help Sympa to spread around the world:

  • Greek (thanks to gotsikas)
  • Occitan (thanks to Ana ribas)
  • Dutch
  • Catalan (thanks to C. Valmary)
  • German
  • Spanish (thanks to D. V. Ulriksen)
  • Japanese (thanks to S. Ikeda)
  • Brasilian Portuguese (thanks to R. Manola)

Sympa 6.1.15 released

October 4, 2012

Here is Sympa 6.1.15, the latest stable version of Sympa.

This release includes mainly bug fixes. A lot of them were fixed by S. Ikeda after being reported by the Sympa users community. Many thanks to all of you!

This release also includes updated translations for the following languages:

  • Greek (thank to kopolyzo)
  • Spanish (thank to D. V. Ulriksen)
  • Estonian (thanks to Urmas)
  • Italian
  • Japanese (thanks to S. Ikeda)
  • Brasilian Portuguese (thanks to R. Manola)

Sympa 6.1.14 (Élias) released

July 27, 2012

Here is Sympa 6.1.14 (Élias), the latest stable version of Sympa.

OK, the last announce was about the 6.1.11 version. What happenned to 12 and 13? They existed and were functionnal, but they suffered from some troubles, particularly at install time. So we didn't announce them and just tagged them; fixed the troubles and now we have a fully functionnal 6.1.14.

Sympa 6.1.14 (Élias) took benefit from the very important activity of Soji Ikeda who, over the last two months, fixed a log of bugs and provided several improvments to the overall behaviour of Sympa. Long known for his works for a better support for internationalization in perl and messenging (see the CPAN modules MIME::Charset or Encode::MIME::EncWords for example) Soji is also deeply involved in Sympa and became the first Sympa core developper outside RENATER. That means he's the only one except for the Sympa authors to be allowed to commit directly into our SVN repository.

Sympa 6.1.14 (Élias) introduces a new feature: User friendly automatic lists. This feature was requested and funded by the CNRS. In short, it allows end-users to create and find automatic lists using the Sympa web interface. Please read the dedicated documentation to learn more about this feature.

This version contains several improvments / changes to Sympa:

  • Improved Marc::Search (S. Ikeda):
    • Now it also gives rich text information. arcsearch template was modified so that it would build HTML text from that information.
    • Strip HTML tags in the file generated from HTML message. Entity references are also unescaped.
    • Texts are handled as Unicode instead of binary text to perform case-insensitive match on non-ASCII characters.
  • Improved handle of “Re:” munging in messages subjects with internationalized support (S. Ikeda);
  • Replaced the “en_US” locale by “en”, saving English speaking users the effort to install the en_US locale when they don't have it (inspired by J. Gilbey);
  • By default, arcsearch (simple) searches in current month and in the previous non-empty one (S. Ikeda);

The new version of Sympa includes also several bug fixes among which:

  • Fixed the database creation scripts,
  • List table was not populated upon command line list creation,
  • SOAP 'add' function reset subscriber's password (S. Ikeda)
  • [#1254][Reported by Olivier Duval] List logs page did not behave as expected, sorting failed and selecting a message to trace ended with a javascript error.
  • [#1031][Reported by Emmanuel Eyer] Lists remained in memory cache after purge in processes, so if a new list was created with the same name it “inherited” some outdated parameters, especially param_constraint entries when using list famillies. Also the list table was not purged.
  • [#3918] HTML tags escaped in search results (S. Ikeda).
  • The DKIM signature sent by Sympa were broken when admin used the “dkim_header_list” parameter. This parameter had no effect on the DKIM module but changed the DKIM header “h=”. The “dkim_header_list” parameter is now obsolete. Default RFC 4871 headers are now used.

Several translations were updated. Thanks a lot to the generous contributors 1) who spent time improving the Sympa internationalization:

  • English 2) (J. Gibley)
  • French (RENATER)
  • Portuguese (Brazil) (R. Manola)
  • Japanese (S. Ikeda)
  • Polish
  • Spanish (D. Viñar Ulriksen)
  • Italian
  • Portuguese
  • Dutch (I. Verdonck)
  • Finnish (J.P. Paloposki)
  • Galician (X. Mosquera)

Sympa 6.1.11 released

May 11, 2012

Check the release notes

This release fixes an upgrade problem with the 6.1.10 version when upgrading from version 6.1.9. In addition, it fixes a potential security threat related to archives.

Hereafter is the release note for version 6.1.10 which is very close of the 6.1.11:

This release fixes several bugs, including a bug leading to Sympa crashing with Perl 5.14.2 (Thanks to E. Bouthenot for fixing this one!)

It includes also the following features:

  • The famous riseup patch that improves Sympa performance by moving parts of the lists config to database. This patch was strongly improved by works from both the Sympa authors and S. Ikeda.
  • Enrichment of lists families by allowing to generate new files sucha as message footers at instantiation.
  • Several contributions, including a new configure options by X. Bachelot and a lot of improvments by S. Ikeda,
  • Several translations have been improved since our last release. Many thanks to the translators for their continuous efforts in improving Sympa:
    • French
    • Japanese (S. Ikeda)
    • Catalan (Lorena)
    • English
    • Dutch
    • Spanish
    • Italian (Cimbala)
    • Arabic
    • Finnish (J.P. Paloposki)

Sympa 6.1.10 released

May 10, 2012

Sympa 6.1.9 released

March 21, 2012

This release includes bug fixes, particularly a problem with the exclusion table which is fixed automatically during the upgrade.

Sympa 6.1.7 released

August 25, 2011

This release includes bug fixes.

Sympa 6.1.6 released

July 20, 2011

This release includes bug fixes.

Sympa 6.1.5 released

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)

Sympa 6.1.4 released

January 21, 2011


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.:-D

New Pootle translation service

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


This release includes mainly bug fixes.

November 5, 2010 - Bug fixes

Sympa 6.1.1 is released

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.

User level message customization

[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

DKIM

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.

http://www.internet2.edu 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 server parameters

DKIM list parameters

See the documentation for details.

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

User exclusion

[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.

Mail reception suspension

[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.

SOAP

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

Internationalisation

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.

Authentication

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

Sympa 6.1 beta overview

 Sympa logo June 14, 2010 - Fixing query troubles

<box>

</box>

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

 Sympa logo June 07, 2010 - Fixing database creation problems

This release includes fixes related to database creation and DKIM.

 Sympa logo 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.

Sympa 6.0.2 released

 Sympa logo 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.

Sympa 6.0.1 released

 Sympa logo

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!

Sympa 6.0 stable released

 Sympa logo 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.

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 mailing architecture

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

Scheduled sendings

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

Less data in files, more in database

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!

Web style

[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…

Password

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.

List cloning

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.

Translations

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!

Miscellaneous

  • 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

 Sympa beta logo After 6 weeks of beta test, It is time to release a new beta version in which all the bug fixes we have heard of are now fixed.

This version also includes a completely updated German translation, thanks to the efforts of M. Warkus.

<box orange|Install note>Fresh installers will now have to run the sympa_wizard.pl script manually to set up their config files. The command to type is specified at the end of the make install command.</box>

Older Sympa users will also note the vanishing of the “bin/etc” directory which contained all the default configuration and configuration samples. All these files and directories are now located in the new “default” directory.

Finally, a new configure parameter, “--enable-fhs” will trigger different installation naming and location rules. If you add this option to configure, the different files used by Sympa will respect the FHS standards. If not, the directories and locations will remain the same as they were in previous versions of Sympa.

Not activating this option will be particularly useful for:

  • people upgrading from a previous installation, which used custom scripts in which files and directory locations are critical
  • anybody installing from the tar.gz distribution. Indeed, most of the files and directories being gathered in a central install directory, it is easy to inspect and customize them. It is also easy to completely remove a Sympa installation.

Activating this option will be particularly useful for Sympa packagers.

P.S.: Should the beta test keep on running smoothly, the stable release should be due at the end of August.:-D

Here comes Sympa V6 beta

 Sympa beta logo The CRU team is pleased to deliver Sympa V6 to the open source community. Sympa V6 is the result of more than one year of project activity and is a great improvement to Sympa earlier versions.

People who want to beta test Sympa 6 will register and give informations so that we know in which environment Sympa was tested . In return, they will get a dedicated help from the Sympa development team during the full beta test. Answering to help request for a beta tester will be our first priority during these seven weeks. This will probably be at the expense of classical support lists, such as sympa-users, so feel free to involve in collaborative support to fill this lack.

If you want to get involved, subscribe to the Sympa beta test mailing list. The subscriber review of this list is closed, safe to the list owners (the Sympa authors). This list is the official registration tool for beta testing. It can be a medium for general questions about the beta but, if you prefer, you can also send assistance requests directly to the sympa authors: sympa-authors@renater.fr.

Message bulk mailer

Sympa comes with a new daemon that copes with low-level message distribution.The new bulk.pl daemon allows to parallelize mail sending across different processes and even on multiple servers. This is a major step towards Sympa clustering. Here are the nice features provided by the new bulk architecture already:

  • message distribution recovery : distribution can now be stopped and restarted later without message duplication for subscribers.
  • priorities : message for a list with a high priority are delivered with a very low latency even is a long distribution is started for a hugue list
  • scheduled message processing : message distribution can be distributed at a specified hour (using a list parameter)

Related changes :

  • you need to start a new bulk.pl process;
  • once sympa.pl has processed a message, it is not delivered, but stored in the bulk spool;
  • the bulk spool is stored in the database (shareable among different servers). You may need to tune the database in order to support large message.
    sympa.pl --test_database_message_buffer

    allow you to test the maximum size of messages that can be stored in your database.

New pretty style

The web interface has been renewed, thanks to Olivier Lumineau (CRU) work. Apart from the new look and feel, the main changes are the new navigation menus for both list administrators and listmasters features.

 The new Sympa admin menu

Sending HTML

You can send HTML pages as messages to your list. this is simply done through the web interface. Just fill in the URL of the page you want to send and a message subject and bam! The page is sent. Please note that this message will be read by mail clients which are quite limited regarding web languages interpretation. So don't try sending pages in which scripts are essential for a good rendering.

 The HTML page sending web interface

Security

Now password are stored as a fingerprint (by the past reversible encryption was used to be able to remind password). Reminding passwords is replaced by an identity token sent by email (thoses tokens can be used only one time and there validity it limited).

Before running Sympa after installing it, you will need to convert all the pre-existing passwords in the new storage encoding. This will be done using the following command:
sympa.pl --md5_encode_password

Please note that this change in password storage is not reversible. Once you did it, there is no way back, despite regenerating all the passwords, so proceed only if you're sure you want to keep using Sympa 6.

Installation process

Guillaume Rousse (IRISA) brought a lot of modifications were brought to the autotools usage in Sympa. This is still a work in progress, but should make the life of Sympa packagers quite easier once it is finished. This work has greatly simplified all Makefiles, turned into Makefile.am. Substitutions in perl modules are now performed at the “make” time, no more during “make install”

Here is the list of significant changes regarding the installation process:

  • Default sympa configuration files, previously stored in PREFIX/bin/etc/ are now stored in PREFIX/share/default/ directory
  • Most --with-xxdir configure options are now obsolete, replaced by equivalent standard --xxdir options.
  • Most default installation directories have been change to adopt standard FHS-compliant locations. However, the distributed tar.gz still uses most of the previous locations to make upgrade process less awkward. If you run “./configure ; make ; make install” with the tar.gz things will install as usually. If you run autoconf, it will define the set of target directories either the old way or the FHS way, depending on whether it finds an existing /etc/sympa.conf file.
  • Removed obsolete sudo wrappers ; Sympa now includes C wrappers for both wwsympa.fcgi and sympa_soap_server.fcgi. Check the manual http://www.sympa.org/manual/index for more informations on that topic
  • A new library is required to build Sympa : gettext-devel. This is necessary to compile the internationalization catalogues.

administration

Cloning

You can now create a list just by copying an existing list. The newly created list has the same configuration options and customization (message headers and footer for example). It has empty subscribers list, archives and shared directory.

 The list copy web interface

New scenario condition
  • less_than. (Submitted by S. Amrani, gendarmerie nationale). It Allows to compare two values. Is true if the first one is less than the second one. Works with strings, too, if you like.
  • verify_netmask. Exemple : verify_netmask('1.12.123.00/24') (changes in intranet scenarii are just commented because we don't have access to the local netmask of installation).
moderation

Moderators can compose rejection notification messages templates for automatic later use, on the web interface.

 The rejection templates management web interface

Spams

Sympa can recognize headers added by incoming spam message filters. Sympa does not answer automatically to those messages, they are submitted in special way to moderators both by mail or in the web interface for moderation. By default rejection is done quietly.

External datasources

Now you may configure a list in order to send notification for new subscribers that are collected from an external datasource.

Web administration

Setting some Sympa parameters is now possible using the web interface. Those parameters are stored in Sympa database. In version 6.0 only colors parameters can be changed using this method, but it settles the core functionalities used to fully transfer the Sympa configuration into its database, and its subsequent edition through the web interface.

Color edition form in Sympa admin

Internationalization

Four new languages were recently added to the standard Sympa distribution. Many thanks to the translators:

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

In addition, Soji ikeda reactivated the legacy character support, as discussed in https://listes.renater.fr/sympa/arc/sympa-dev/2006-09/msg00029.html and its follow-ups. if the (new) sympa.conf parameter 'legacy_character_support_feature' value is set to 'on', the legacy character support is enabled.

Bug fixes

Lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of bug fixes.

Just have a look at the NEWS file in the distribution to be convinced. :-D

Sympa 6 webinar (in French)

Pour présenter les nouveautés de la version 6 de Sympa, le CRU a organisé un webinar qui s'est déroulé le jeudi 14 mai 2009 à 10h30 pour les administrateurs de services de listes de diffusion,

Points abordés :

  1. Présentation des nouvelles fonctionnalités de la version 6, ainsi que des évolutions de l'architecture,
  2. Processus d'upgrade depuis les versions antérieures,
  3. Le principe du beta test et du support aux beta-testeurs,
  4. Où va Sympa ? Quelques axes de développement envisagés pour l'avenir.
although this webinar (and the following description) is in french language, we plan to do it in English too, though we didn't define any date yet.

Sympa 6 is near

We are pleased to announce that we are currently working on the latest features to be included in the next major version of Sympa: the 6.0.

Sympa 6 is an evolution of the software towards scalability and high availability. It will also offer a better ease of use and improved possibilities to adapt it to your particular needs and information system.

Shortly, the Sympa 6.0 will offer the following major features:

  • Mail sending improvements: checkpoint recovery, scheduled sending, better priority handling…
  • Making users life easier: personalized welcome page, good looking web interface, contextual help…
  • For owners and moderator: reject message customization, list cloning…
  • Easier packaging. The full autotools usage in Sympa was rewritten by Guillaume Rousse (INRIA) (thanks again Guillaume! :-)). This should greatly improve the life of Sympa packagers around here.
  • As always: improved internationalization, thanks to the efforts all the fine people involved in Sympa translation.

Here is the scheduled timeline to this new Sympa version:

  • Tuesday 5th May: release of Sympa 6.0 beta
  • Tuesday 30th June: release of the stable version of Sympa 6.0

The most attentive readers will note that, for once, we spared a 7 weeks beta test period. That's because we felt a cruel lack of beta testing in the most recent releases of Sympa. This notably led to awkward bug reports a few days after the release. These were bugs on functionalities that were tested during several months on our own production system. Problem is: due to the high diversity of systems (OS, RDBMS, MTA, web servers…) likely to be used with Sympa, there are a lot of combinations we can't test. Early bug reports are the consequences of such combinations.

That's why we want to encourage people beta testing Sympa. We want you to install the beta version on production servers.

So this is our proposal: People who want to beta test Sympa 6 will register and give informations so that we know in which environment Sympa was tested . In return, they will get a dedicated help from the Sympa development team during the full beta test. Answering to help request for a beta tester will be our first priority during these seven weeks. This will probably be at the expense of classical support lists, such as sympa-users, so feel free to involve in collaborative support to fill this lack.

If you want to get involved, subscribe to the Sympa beta test mailing list. The subscriber review of this list is closed, safe to the list owners (the Sympa authors). This list is the official registration tool for beta testing. It can be a medium for general questions about the beta but, if you prefer, you can also send assistance requests directly to the sympa authors: sympa-authors@renater.fr.

Looking forward to see you in the beta!

Cheers,

The Sympa development team.

Sympa 5.4.7 - March 30th 2009

<box>

</box>

A few bug fixes in this version, which is mainly released to include the great translation work recently achieved. Thanks again to the translators!

Namely, the following languages have seen their translation improved:

  • Catalan, thanks to J. Giralt
  • English, thanks to M. Radford
  • Estonian, thanks to U. Buhvestov
  • Finn, thanks to J.P. Paloposki
  • Japanese, thanks to S. Ikeda
  • Russian, thanks to Chernysh
  • Spanish, thanks to D. Viñar Ulriksen
  • Vietnamese, thanks to C. Siddall

We also decided to make four new languages available by default in Sympa:

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

This release mainly fixes a bug making users miss an important warning when installing Sympa.

The sample SOAP client was broken ; it has been restored :

This is a simple PHP SOAP client, but you can check the Sympa SOAP API definition to design more complex applications.

This release contains bug fixes and updated translations.

  • Fix a bug regarding LDAP 2 level queries partial failures
  • Fix a bug regarding blacklist edition. This is a potential security threat, so anybody using a Sympa server with blacklists enabled should consider upgrading shortly.

Thanks to all the contributors who submitted bug reports or even sent patches.

It also includes updated translations, amongst which:

  • Finnish, thanks to J.P. Paloposki,
  • English, thanks to A. Epstein,
  • Nederlands, thanks to R. E. Sonneveld.

Thanks to all of them for their great work in Sympa internationalisation.

This release is aimed at the last bug fixes - including some security issues - for the 5.4 branch, amongst which :

  • Sympa was not fully compliant to the RFC 2616, leading for example to possible unwanted list deletion by administrators using prefetching tools. This was fixed by replacing all the threatening GET requests by POST requests;
  • Use of sprint() function for creating SQL queries lead to possible SQL injection through cookie manipulation;
  • The use of files in /tmp lead to vulnerabilities.

Thanks to all the contributors who submitted bug reports or even sent patches.

It also includes updated translations, amongst which:

  • Modern chinese, thanks to M. Smith,
  • Vietnamese, thanks to C. Siddall,
  • Russian, thanks to Chernysh,
  • Bokmål, thanks to B.C. Aasgaard,
  • Japanese, thanks to S. Ikeda,
  • Magyar, thanks to H. Szabolcs,
  • Finnish, thanks to J.P. Paloposki,
  • Estonian, thanks to U. Buhvestov,
  • Spanish, thanks to D. Magaña,
  • German, thanks to S. Weber,
  • Catalan, thanks to J. Deu-Pons.

Thanks to all of them for their great work in Sympa internationalisation.


1)
A side note to translators: Please remember to log in to the Pootle server when submitting improved trnaslations, or we will never know who did this translations. We would really like to at least thank you when we release new versions including your work.
2)
Yes, we speak such a bad English that we need Native English contributors to fix it. Thanks again, guys!
  • previous_release_note.1426674618.txt.gz
  • Last modified: 2015/06/11 15:36
  • (external edit)