[Mailman-Users] PROBLEM: Cron <mailman at king> /usr/bin/python -S/var/mailman/cron/senddigests

[stephen at xemacs.org]

Mark Sapiro writes:

 > You have to find the problem message which will be in some list's
 > lists/listname/digest.mbox file and edit the file to either fix or
 > remove the problem message.

Note that fixing the message is a matter of adding or removing a few
"=" at the end of a BASE64-encoded text.

Since it's in a body part, look for a header that says

Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64

Following that header section there will be a body part of long lines
of random-looking characters with no spaces in them and very few
punctuation characters.  Most mailers produce lines of 64 characters
(IIRC), so to check the length-multiple-of-4 constraint, just look at
the last line.  It should end with 0, 1, or 2 "=" signs as padding to
make it a multiple of 4 (there's a technical reason why 3 is impossible).

As long as you don't do *anything else* to the file, adding or
subtracting "=" as described here cannot make the situation worse. :-)

[[ For completeness, if had been in a header, you'd be looking for a
"MIME encoded word" which looks like

=?ENCODING?B?BASE64-characters-length-multiple-of-4?=

The "=?" prefix, "?" separators, and "?=" are literal.  The "ENCODING"
depends on character set used, the "B" means "BASE64", and the rest is
encoded content.  If the "BASE64-characters-length-multiple-of-4" part
is not a multiple of 4, then it should end with "=" pad characters,
either 1 or 2. ]]

HTH

Steve