Re: Email Distribution Lists???

[Michael Ströder <michael@stroeder.com>]

pll+ldap@lanminds.com wrote:
>Michael Ströder wrote:
>>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.

Which is a duplication of Distinguised Names... ;-)

>>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.

Whether it's less maintenance work depends very much on your deployment 
scenario.

> 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.

I'd disagree for almost all definitions of "more efficient". ;-)

Ciao, Michael.