Re: Email Distribution Lists???

[pll+ldap@lanminds.com]

>Michael Dengler wrote:
> >
> > ie. Bill, Ted, and Alice are all members of the payroll dept. with each
> > one having an address entry in the LDAP directory. I would like to also
> > have an address called PAYROLL that would contain the email addresses of
> > Bill, Ted, and Alice. I could simply create an address entry and call it
> > PAYROLL an enter Bill, Ted, and Alice's email addresses, but this would
> > be difficult to maintain.
>
>Why is that too difficult to maintain? It's a group entry with e-mail 
>addresses stored in the member attribute.

I don't think it's too difficult to maintain, however, you do end up 
having a duplication of data, i.e. the e-mail address.

I would think it better to have a groupOfUniqueNames for each group, 
which lists the DNs of each member.  The MTA should be able to look 
up the list of members of each group, then for each DN, access their 
e-mail address.  


>Why is that more easy to maintain? Also note that this approach does not 
>scale very well. It's rather a major PITA regarding performance since you 
>have to do n+1 searches for a group of n e-mail recipients.

Exactly. The down side is this involves a second level of redirection,
but it also keeps the duplication of data to a minimum.  I'm not sure
it's any less maintenance intensive, though.  Regardless of whether
you choose to keep a list of e-mail addresses, or a list of DNs, you
still have to keep a list of something, so, in this case, it's 
probably more efficient to just keep the list of e-mail addresses in 
the groupOfUniqueNames.

-- 

Seeya,
Paul
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