Introduction

You may find yourself in a situation where you have a dynamic, external source of user accounts that you wish to keep synchronized with an NCSA email list. One of your options for accomplishing this is to configure your email list to periodically import a remote data source file that you make available at a secured HTTP URL.

Prepare a data source file

Follow the documentation in the Campus Mailing List Guide to construct your data source file. Here's an example for illustration purposes, which you would save as list.txt according to the example below.

    ## Data for Sympa member import
    # Served at https://example.com/list.txt
    #
    jsmith@example.com Jane Smith
    bob@example.com Robert Jones

It is important to check that all non-comment lines use valid syntax with the first field being a valid email address.

Serve a data source file

Deploy a webserver that serves your data source file at some URL ( e.g., https://example.com/list.txt ), secured by both TLS encryption (HTTPS) and HTTP Basic Auth. Verify that the URL and Basic Auth credentials work correctly by using a standard web browser.

Configure the email list

Ensure that you are set as a "privileged" list owner for your NCSA email list (this is above a "normal" owner). This is necessary for you to have access to the Data sources setup page (Admin > Edit List Config > Data sources setup) you can reach by logging into https://lists.ncsa.illinois.edu.

Enter the file access information into the Remote file inclusion panel.

Manually import the remote data source file

Use the Synchronize members with data sources button (Admin > Manage Subscribers) to verify that your email list is being synchronized properly.