[Mailman-Users] Mailman having Unicode character problems in moderator request page.

[Scott Garman]

Hi all,

I've searched high and low for some answers to this problem and I've
seen a lot about it, but no specific fixes for mailman. I hope someone
here can help me, as the problem has become critical.

I'm running mailman-2.1.4 which is the version included with Mandrake
10, which is the distro I'm running. I also have these python packages
installed:

libpython2.3-2.3.3
python-2.3.3
python-base-2.3.3
python-numeric-23.1

My problem is this: I received some spam which apparently contains some
Unicode characters to a moderated mailing list. At first, I could go to
the "pending moderator requests" page and deal with other pending
messages, but any time I tried discarding this particular message,
mailman would display an error page with the message:

UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\xed' in
position 107: ordinal not in range(128)

After doing some research and not finding a possible fix for this, I
decided to try going in to mailman's queue and deleting the message
manually. The way mandrake compiled/packaged it, it looked to me the
queue file was in /var/lib/mailman/data/. It was named
heldmsg-<mylist>-####.pck. I deleted it and restarted the mailman
service. 

Apparently that was Not A Good Thing (TM), because now going to the
pending moderator requests page shows that message, and I can no longer
deal with my incoming messages. 

Please, can anyone help?

Thank you,

Scott

---------------------------------------------------------------------

Bug in Mailman version 2.1.4
We're sorry, we hit a bug!
If you would like to help us identify the problem, please email a copy
of this page to the webmaster for this site with a description of what
happened. Thanks!


Traceback:
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/lib/mailman/scripts/driver", line 87, in run_main
    main()
  File "/usr/lib/mailman/Mailman/Cgi/admindb.py", line 228, in main
    num += show_helds_overview(mlist, form)
  File "/usr/lib/mailman/Mailman/Cgi/admindb.py", line 473, in show_helds_overview
    mlist.HandleRequest(id, mm_cfg.DISCARD)
  File "/usr/lib/mailman/Mailman/ListAdmin.py", line 184, in HandleRequest
    forward, addr)
  File "/usr/lib/mailman/Mailman/ListAdmin.py", line 373, in __handlepost
    syslog('vette', note)
  File "/usr/lib/mailman/Mailman/Logging/Syslog.py", line 40, in write
    self.write_ex(kind, msg, args, kws)
  File "/usr/lib/mailman/Mailman/Logging/Syslog.py", line 58, in write_ex
    logf.write(msg + '\n')
  File "/usr/lib/mailman/Mailman/Logging/StampedLogger.py", line 73, in write
    Logger.write(self, "%s %s" % (prefix, msg))
  File "/usr/lib/mailman/Mailman/Logging/Logger.py", line 91, in write
    f.write(msg)
UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\xed' in position 107: ordinal not in range(128)