Sympa

Sympa (Fr. "nice" or for " sympathetic " Apronym of Systeme de Multi -Postage Automatique, German system for automatic multi - shipping ) is a software for managing mailing lists. Christophe Wolfhugel Sympa developed as a successor of TULP, a now no longer evolving software, the same purpose.

Sympa is released under the GPL, making it free software.

Properties

Since Sympa used internally relational databases, it is usually faster than systems that manage their internal management via simple text files. Due to this the software is suited for use in environments with a lot of subscribers and / or high turnover. List administrators can generate subscriber lists from sources such as external databases and LDAP directories dynamically. Virtual mail domains are also supported by Sympa.

Furthermore, there is the possibility to sign emails using S / MIME and encrypt.

A web interface provided for users, lists and server administrators can be operated as a FastCGI service. About this Web interface, RSS feeds of the mailing lists are served.

The wide range of authentication options, including LDAP, CAS and Shibboleth allow integration of Sympa in complex infrastructures. To protect against the spread of viruses, it is possible to check all incoming and e-mails sent by a virus scanner.

Since Sympa supports character encoding UTF -8, mailing lists can be shown in a large number of languages ​​.

History

The development began in 1995, were desired as new features in TULP and it was found that the source code of TULP was not robust enough to integrate these new features. Christophe Wolfhugel, who had been involved in the development of TULP, then Sympa started from scratch to write on again. Until the first publication took nearly two years. In 1999, the web interface has been added. Another two years later, the developers extend the functions to the S / MIME capabilities and the virus scanner plugin.

Support for LDAP authentication, and virtual hosting was published in 2002. In September 2003, followed by opportunities to authenticate using CAS and Shibboleth. A month later, in December 2003, supporting the SOAP interface became available.

The web interface underwent several changes in 2005. The language that was converted from HTML to XHTML, mailing lists were now available via RSS feed. The former last big step was the conversion of the character encoding to UTF -8 in 2006.

Since Sympa is continuously developed and improved.

Users (selection)

  • UNESCO
  • ETH Zurich
  • Fraunhofer Institute for Intelligent Analysis and Information Systems
  • Humboldt -Universität zu Berlin
  • New Sorbonne ( University of Paris III)
  • Duke University
  • University of Innsbruck
  • Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz
  • Philipps- University of Marburg
  • LinuxTag eV

Sympa is used by a variety of institutions, universities and companies.

Central Authentication Service Markup language Fraunhofer Society
758187
de