S/MIME and Sympa mailing lists manager / Using signature and encryption with a mailing list manager

Abstract

Preface The development was initiated in 1997. The goal was to replace a previous mailing lists server "TULP", initiated in 1992 to organize the Bitnet services migration and was used essentially by French universities. Since April 97, Sympa development provided by the French academic network team (CRU) and distributed under Gnu Public Licence. Now Sympa includes a lot of sophisticated features and is widely used around the world. The Open source community provide many mailing lists servers (http://listes.cru.fr/sympa/ robots.php3). Why developing one more mailing lists server ? We believe that mailing lists are a major service that needs a perfect adaptation to each application domain. Sympa is the only software that provides the following characteristics: 1. Full compliance to RFCs including MIME in any aspect of the service 2. Internationalization: Sympa is available with the it, de, fr, us, fi, es, cn langages (pl and se are under waiting). 3. Enhanced customisation possibilities 4. Good performances 5. Easy to manage for list master. Example: dynamic lists directory. 6. Integrated user and admin web interface Easy extensions of features (object oriented code). 1.2 A few original features Using internal RDBMS Firt goal is to support large services with high performances and scalability relying on RDBMS (MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, Sybase supported). Sympa has been tested with 300.000 subscribers in a single list on a medium server (bi PII 550mhz with 512 Mega RAM) and some users already have real usage with more than 100.000 subscribers using MySQL. The database allows high performances. It also resolves data acces conflict between Sympa's mail and web interface that share the same datas.