Hans Joachim Wenzel wrote:

we "private" archive all our lists - and its come the time where we need to free space up on the volume that its archiving to. We are using version 2.1.12.

We tried to edit the archives/private/listname.mbox/listname.mbox file to remove the messages we don't want and then run 'bin/arch --wipe listname' and got:

exim@mailhost-locust] /usr/local/mailman/bin $ ./arch --wipe security
#00000 <20090102122338.D9D2A15804B@flens.dfn-cert.de> Schreibe Archivzustand in Datei /HAmailhost/mailman/archives/private/security/pipermail.pck Traceback (most recent call last): File "./arch", line 201, in ? main() File "./arch", line 189, in main archiver.processUnixMailbox(fp, start, end) File "/usr/local/mailman/Mailman/Archiver/pipermail.py", line 578, in processUnixMailbox a = self._makeArticle(m, self.sequence) File "/usr/local/mailman/Mailman/Archiver/HyperArch.py", line 684, in _makeArticle mlist=self.maillist) File "/usr/local/mailman/Mailman/Archiver/HyperArch.py", line 308, in __init__ charset = message.get_content_charset(cset_out) File "/usr/lib/python2.4/email/Message.py", line 800, in get_content_charset charset = unicode(charset, 'us-ascii').encode('us-ascii') TypeError: decoding Unicode is not supported

The archive was completely lost and restored from backup. Any help would be appropriate.

This is due to an incompatibility between Mailman 2.1.12 and the email package in some Python 2.4.x releases. See the March 2009 note in the FAQ at <http://wiki.list.org/x/pYA9> which includes a link to a patch to the Python lib/email/Charset.py module to fix this.

Also see the comment thread in the bug report at <https://bugs.launchpad.net/mailman/+bug/328353>.

I'm surprised that this was the only place you noticed this problem. Are there occasional shunted messages and error log tracebacks?

-- Mark Sapiro <mark@msapiro.net> The highway is for gamblers, San Francisco Bay Area, California better use your sense - B. Dylan