[Kolab-devel] Request for email alias handling easy fix

[Fabio Pietrosanti]

Bernhard Reiter ha scritto:

>Am Freitag, 23. Dezember 2005 09:27 schrieb Fabio Pietrosanti:
>  
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>>I crawled at the mailing list archives of kolab and i noticed that *a
>>lot* of people when look at "Distribution List" think about email alias
>>management.
>>    
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>We face the difficulty of making creating a common understanding
>about what "distribution lists" are within Kolab.
>The problem is similiar with "groups", "shared folders", "groupware"
>and other terms.
>I fear that this can never be solved completely, it is just important
>that we document even better what the different terms mean within Kolab.
>
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>>Email alias management using distribution list information should
>>could't be a "quick" solution?
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>Probably not, I would need to think about it.
>Also what you call "aliases" is called "mailinglists" by others.
>In theory it is quite easy to take any ldap object that can hold several email
>aliases and add an ldap lookup to postfix.
>Then you would need to add the handling of those aliases to the webinterface.
>  
>
In the day by day practice every email system, even the most simple,
allow to setup an address "something at domain.com" that forward all the
messages to several other email address.
Those feature is called email aliases and not mailing lists which,
instead, use other message handling feature like subscription,
authorization, moderation, archival, etc, etc
Mailing lists are something really different and are needed only when
some specific feature (subscription, archivial, moderation, etc) are
required.
I integrated sympa with kolab, but this was needed because of specific
needs that would not be solved by simple email aliases.

In any other email system usually small "group" of people share a common
"email alias".
This is needed to create in a easy, efficient and quick way
coordination/discussion groups. (I'm personally in the "email aliases"
of many small groups of many organizations and none of them use mailing
lists softwares).

A name like "Distribution List" i think that will ever remind to every
person "An object which contain a list of personal email addresses that
allow the dstribution of messages".
This really sound to me "an email alias/unstructured mailing lists"

If DL are only used to managed "groups" for handling ACL of cyrus shared
folder why not simply call them "groups"?

Let's discuss about the object that would be used to handling email aliases.

Does it require for the project a new object in the kolab schema to be
defined to handle this feature?