The sympa module offers the Sympa class, which represents a Sympa node. The constructor takes only one parameter, the URL of the site, and then the login method can be used to authenticate with an e-mail address and password. Currently, supported functionality includes a read-only access to shared files (listing and reading).

>>> from sympa import Sympa
>>> s = Sympa()
>>> s.log_in('https://db.bme.hu/lists', 'username', 'password')
>>> a.lists
{'konzi.adatlabor': <MailingList "konzi.adatlabor">}

Also, the sympafs module can be used to mount the shared files of mailing lists to the file system using FUSE (Linux, Mac OS X and FreeBSD are supported).

$ python sympafs.py https://db.bme.hu/lists username konzi.adatlabor /tmp/sympa
Password:
$ ls -la /tmp/sympa
total 16
dr-xr-xr-x  2 root root     0 Mar 25 22:23 .
drwxrwxrwx 18 root root 16384 Mar 25 22:20 ..
dr-xr-xr-x  2 root root     0 Feb 14  2005 2002
dr-xr-xr-x  2 root root     0 Feb 14  2005 2003
...
$ fusermount -u /tmp/sympa

• Shared files access is read-only
• SympaFS caching is naive: freshness is not checked, and there's no garbage collection
• The result of a timed out session is unkown
• The contents of the page is not checked for error messages

The whole project is licensed under MIT license.

• Python 2.x (tested on 2.7)
• LXML (Debian/Ubuntu package: python-lxml)
• requests (http://docs.python-requests.org/)
• fusepy (for SympaFS only, http://code.google.com/p/fusepy/)