Re: Netscape 4.5X and Mail List

[Julio Sánchez Fernández <j_sanchez@stl.es>]

Raymond Racine wrote:

> In the Netscape Address Book the Personal Address Book allows the
> creation of groupOfNames that operate as a mailing list.  When I create
> a list in the Personal Address Book and export it I can see it is
> nothing more then a groupOfNames object class with member: attributes.
> 
> When I setup a groupOfNames object class in OpenLDAP,  the Netscape
> Address Book client will see it and display the members, however, I
> cannot get it to treat it as an Email List.  It works in the Personal
> Address Book, but not in a LDAP Directory.
> 
> Is this the nature of the LDAP client capabilities in Netscape
> or......am I doing something wrong.

I think Netscape Communicator is not designed to do that.  It seems it only
mails to entries in the directory that have a mail attribute themselves and
expects some mail server along the way to do any necessary alias expansion.

You may request Netscape to enhance their client to do this, but there are
philosophical problems with it.  Attribute types do not always have a full
semantics definition and, thus, were the Netscape client to follow data from
any random server there might be unforeseen implications.  Or not, I really
don't know.

I think Netscape will support just two modes.  In one of them, you keep your
private mail lists in a personal address book that is maybe kept in an LDAP
directory when using roaming profiles.  In the second mode, the mailing list
is public and is exploded by the mail server.  OpenLDAP comes with a mailer
called mail500 that you can combine with sendmail.  It will use the values
of "member" to expand the list.  But you will have to give the mail group
entry an objectclass rfc822MailGroup.  A problem now is that if you want the
client to search the group entry and mail to it, you will need a "mail"
attribute in the group entry and mail500 will try to expand to that attribute
as well, creating a mail loop.  You will need to make some adjustments to
mail500 to use it.  Check it out anyway.

I have been rewriting most of mail500 lately to make it more flexible, but
it is far from being in a usable state.  It is in the HEAD (devel) cvs
branch.

Julio