I seem to have found an error where pipermail fails to process mail sent from pine (and possibly other mailers). The message gets added to the <listname>.mbox file but nothing else. In the logs/error file I get the following message:

Nov 15 00:15:01 2000 qrunner(32366): Traceback (innermost last): Nov 15 00:15:01 2000 qrunner(32366): File "/usr/lib/mailman/Mailman/Archiver/Archiver.py", line 221, in ArchiveMail Nov 15 00:15:01 2000 qrunner(32366): File "/usr/lib/mailman/Mailman/Archiver/pipermail.py", line 521, in processUnixMailbox Nov 15 00:15:01 2000 qrunner(32366): File "/usr/lib/mailman/Mailman/Archiver/HyperArch.py", line 224, in __init__ Nov 15 00:15:01 2000 qrunner(32366): TypeError: read-only character buffer, None Nov 15 00:15:01 2000 (32366) CORRUPT ARCHIVE FOR LIST: test

Looking at the file HyperArch.py at line 224 I find the following:

    # Snag the content-* headers.  RFC 1521 states that their values

are # case insensitive. ctype = message.getheader('Content-Type') or "text/plain" cenc = message.getheader('Content-Transfer-Encoding') self.ctype = string.lower(ctype) self.cenc = string.lower(cenc)

(line 224 is the last one.) So, apparently it is failing when it tries to lowercase the "Content-Transfer-Encoding" header string.

So, I checked, and sure enough, pine (at least on the two systems I had access to) does not set this header. I then looked at RFC 1521 to see if this header is required. From the RFC (p.14) I quote:

These values are not case sensitive. That is, Base64 and BASE64 and bAsE64 are all equivalent. An encoding type of 7BIT requires that the body is already in a seven-bit mail-ready representation. This is the default value -- that is, "Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7BIT" is assumed if the Content-Transfer-Encoding header field is not present.

So, the "Contenet-Transfer-Encoding" header is not mandatory and pipermail should not crash when it isn't there. Since I don't actually know python, :-) can anyone suggest an easy fix? It doesn't seem like it would be that hard to fix.

I believe this is the same problem that Joshua Burley jburley@kuci.org first reported.

Tanner Lovelace P.S. Should I submit this as a bug to sourceforge?