[Mailman-Users] Bounce exception

[Mike Orr]

I installed Mailman 2.0.6 (from the Debian package) last week, and
certain bounce messages are causing the qrunner to abort:

Aug 29 15:01:03 2001 qrunner(19529):   
File "/usr/lib/mailman/Mailman/Bouncers/DSN.py", line 46, in process
     if string.lower(msg.gettype()) <> 'multipart/report' or \
TypeError :  read-only character buffer, None

When this happens, it seems to stop up all the other list messages and
they don't get through.  My /var/lib/mailman/qfiles directory contains
212 pairs of *.db / *.msg files, which I assume are unprocessed messages
(mostly bounces it looks like).

I ran qrunner under pdb and found that the offending section is:

(in Mailman/Bouncers/DSN.py:)
 45     def process(msg):
 46  ->     if string.lower(msg.gettype()) <> 'multipart/report' or \
 47            string.lower(msg.getparam('report-type')) <> 'delivery-status':
 48             # then
 49             return None

msg.getparam('report-type') is returning None, which string.lower() chokes on.  
msg is a mimetools.Message instance.  mimetools.py (Python 1.5.2) says
self.getparam() looks in self.plist[] , etc, like this:

1) Message.__init__() calls Message.parsetype(), which reads the
'content-type' header and sets self.plisttext.

(Pdb) p msg.getheader('content-type')
'multipart/report; boundary="---Multi-Part-Report-Level-1-1-29853"'

(Pdb) p msg.plisttext
'; boundary="---Multi-Part-Report-Level-1-1-29853"'


2) Message.__init__() calls Message.parseplist(), which builds 
self.plist[] from self.plisttext.  

(Pdb) p msg.plist
['boundary="---Multi-Part-Report-Level-1-1-29853"']

3) Later, our unfortunate method calls self.getparam('report-type'),
does not find 'report-type' (since the list contains only 'boundary'),
returns None, and the qrunner dies.


The first time it happened, I went up a few steps in the debugger,
found that the "mlist.Unlock()" call [qrunner.py line 256 (main()]
contains a 'file' variable with the current message filename
('8e1e772dc6e98db0e84fec6e4d3444eab7ddfa1a.msg'), unsubscribed the
offending address, and deleted the message in /var/lib/mailman/qfiles .
Then the qrunner ran without error and one of my earlier messages made
it through.  But then I looked in the logs a little later and found the
same error, this time from a different message.


Is this a known problem?  Is it worth upgrading to 2.1a2 ?  Is the
message header incorrect MIME?  But shouldn't Mailman be able to handle
problems like this gracefully?  Does anybody have any ideas, or do I
have to write myself a patch to work around this?

-- 
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   Mike Orr, mso at ssc.com |  SSC, publishers of Linux Journal 
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