[Mailman-Users] Messages shunted with "TypeError: decoding Unicode is not supported"

[Josh Clark]

Thanks again, Mark, this is all *very* appreciated.

> I'm interested in how many of these addresses are u'...', and how  
> they got to be that way.


Of the 1639 e-mail addresses, 349 are u'...' I don't have any great  
ideas about what might be out of the ordinary about my installation.  
I've never made any mods to the Mailman scripts. I *have* used custom  
html templates (charset=utf-8), but I don't think that this would  
affect the character encoding on the server side, would it? If you'd  
like to take a look:
<http://mailman.globalmoxie.com/mailman/listinfo/moxiemail>

However, the majority of subscriptions come via a script that I set up  
to send subscribe commands via email to the list. It accepts an email  
address in a web form and sends it along as a subscribe command to  
moxiemail-requests. Here's a sample (with domains changed to  
example.com):

------
Return-Path: <support at example.com>
X-Original-To: moxiemail-request at example.com
Delivered-To: moxiemail-request at example.com
Received: by houdini.example.com (Postfix, from userid 536)
	id 26E3A312869A; Tue, 28 Oct 2008 14:38:07 -0500 (CDT)
From: support at example.com
To: moxiemail-request at example.com
Subject: subscribe address=test at example.com
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII; format=flowed
Message-Id: <20081028193807.26E3A312869A at houdini.example.com>
Date: Tue, 28 Oct 2008 14:38:07 -0500 (CDT)

subscribe address=test at example.com
------

I'm happy to do any tests or troubleshooting that might be helpful to  
get at the root problem.

> The attached patch to Decorate.py (applied after removing the other  
> one) will work around the problem.

Excellent, thanks! A quick question before I try it: I've now tried to  
send this message a few times; is it possible that these attempts were  
successfully mailed to some portion of the list (e.g., some of the non- 
unicode addresses)? If it's an indicator, the last address that showed  
up with the "bin/withlist" commands that you suggested was also the  
same address that showed up in the message footer for the debug patch  
that you originally sent (and, I presume, the address that caused the  
error).

(If it's likely that some significant number of people have gotten  
several copies of the message, I just want to add an apology for the  
repeats before mailing it again. Either way, I'll give the patch a  
spin in the next 24 hours.)

Thanks again for all of the speedy, detailed help with this.

All best,
Josh