[Mailman-Users] Unable to purge corrupt address

[Dwight Ernest]

Barry Warsaw wrote:
> On Mon, 2003-03-17 at 15:15, Chuq Von Rospach wrote:
> 
>>This gave me an idea, since I had a list with a binary email address  
>>(how? add_members of a directory instead of a file in the directory.  
>>oops).
> 
> 
> Oh, I should point out one other thing.  I fixed Mailman cvs so that it
> would reject non-ascii characters in the email address.  Not in the
> realname of course, but only in the email address.

That's interesting. It appears to me, though, that realnames with 
certain characters can also cause problems, and might even provide a 
means to do a service denial.

Yesterday I had a complaint from one of our list managers that no 
traffic was getting through the list. I checked, and found exceptions in 
the error log that looked like this:

Mar 21 09:55:32 2003 (19445) Uncaught runner exception: ASCII decoding 
error: ordinal not in range(128)
Mar 21 09:55:32 2003 (19445) Traceback (most recent call last):
   File "/var/mailman/Mailman/Queue/Runner.py", line 105, in _oneloop
     self._onefile(msg, msgdata)
   File "/var/mailman/Mailman/Queue/Runner.py", line 155, in _onefile
     keepqueued = self._dispose(mlist, msg, msgdata)
   File "/var/mailman/Mailman/Queue/CommandRunner.py", line 189, in _dispose
     Replybot.process(mlist, msg, msgdata)
   File "/var/mailman/Mailman/Handlers/Replybot.py", line 106, in process
     subject, text, mlist.preferred_language)
   File "/var/mailman/Mailman/Message.py", line 203, in __init__
     self['Subject'] = Header(subject, charset, header_name='Subject')
   File "/var/mailman/pythonlib/email/Header.py", line 166, in __init__
     self.append(s, charset)
   File "/var/mailman/pythonlib/email/Header.py", line 251, in append
     ustr = unicode(s, incodec)
UnicodeError: ASCII decoding error: ordinal not in range(128)

Mar 21 09:55:32 2003 (19445) SHUNTING: 
1048258532.173237+a971c23a19dece2178fb7b2fa6e056851160771b

I checked the list, and found that (among other things) a member had 
subscribed with a realname like "Fred Smith (Austin)". "Couldn't be the 
parens," I thought. But after looking around to find other possible 
explanations, in vain, I decided to just try removing the " (Austin)" 
part of the realname string. Voila -- after un-shunting, every shunted 
post (30 or so) went through unimpeded.

I've since tried reproducing the error, and I can't. So it's possible 
that something else fixed the problem, though I made no other changes.

--Dwight Ernest