9.1.4 To Modify Group Membership Attribute Syntax

Support has been added for postprocessing LDAP expansion results with a mapping. The new LDAP_URL_RESULT_MAPPING MTA option can be used to specify the name of a group attribute which in turn specifies the name of a mapping. This mapping will be applied to any results returned by expanding either a mgrpDeliverTo or memberURL attribute. The mapping probe will be of the form:

LDAP-URL|LDAP-result

If the mapping returns with $Y set the mapping result string will replace the LDAP result for alias processing purposes. If the mapping returns with $N set the result will be skipped.

This mechanism can be used to define groups based on attributes that don't contain proper email address. For example, suppose a company has placed pager numbers in all their user entries. Messages can be sent to these numbers via email by suffixing them with a particular domain. A group could then be defined as follows:

1. Define a new mgrpURLResultMapping attribute in the directory and set the LDAP_URL_RESULT_MAPPING MTA option to this attribute's name.

2. Define a page-all group with the following attributes:

   mgrpDeliverto: ldap:///o=usergroup?pagerTelephoneNumber?sub mgrpURLResultMapping: PAGER-NUMBER-TO-ADDRESS

3. Define the mapping:

   PAGER-NUMBER-TO-ADDRESS *|* "$1"@pagerdomain.com$Y

   Even more interesting effects can be achieved by combining this mechanism with the PROCESS_SUBSTITUTION mechanism described in 10.12.1 Optimizing Authorization Checks to the LDAP Directory for Messages Addressed to Mailing Lists. For example, it would be easy to create a metagroup where sending to an address of the form

   pager+user@domain.com

   sends a page to the user named user.