[Mailman-Users] LDAP integration (& passwords)

[James McCrea]

Hi list,

I'm going to be deploying mailman in place of majordomo soon, but just
have some questions that i've not been able to find answers for thus
far...

We have an institution wide LDAP service which will increasingly contain
information that we would use for building lists from. This would include
both lists created dynamically from the ldap info at mail-time, and also
those created (perhaps via a script) that check for an attribute at some
given point and build a list.

In addition to the above we use the LDAP servers for authentication for
services such as mail, and the passwords stored here are in sync with
those on our Active Directory setup.

It is *very* desireable to be able to allow users to authenticate for
mailing list purposes by using their existing password that is used for
all other services (mail, webmail, logging on, restricted site access
etc)
I know that some of this functionality is available via 3rd party
plugins, but I'm wondering if this will be integrated with the mail
mailman stream in the future, as i'd look silly working to merge things
and then finding that! ;)

Obviously monthly reminders etc are inappropriate in this setup, we
wouldn't want the passwords being pushed about in plain text. But i'm happy
that's not a major problem and can be sorted whenever.

Any pointers or info about the mailman roadmap much appreciated, as are
comments from people (esp educational institutions) running in a similar
fashion.

Cheers
James McCrea
Computing Officer
University of Kent


NB, just in case it helps, here's our background:
We have approx 2000 lists, most of which are less than a hundred addressses
and change relatively frequently (~annually) and the others which are
just a few lists with many users (up to a few thousand addresses)