[Mailman-Users] Mailman bails during "Administrative requests"

[Edward Elhauge]

I'd like some help on dealing with this problem permanently. I've been
getting this behavior every couple of months and haven't found a good
solution yet.

The way it happens is that I'm on the "Administrative requests" page for
some mailing list and when I submit the deletion requests I get the
following reply from the browser:
    Bug in Mailman version 2.1.6

    We're sorry, we hit a bug!

    Please inform the webmaster for this site of this problem. Printing of
    traceback and other system information has been explicitly inhibited,
    but the webmaster can find this information in the Mailman error logs.

Usually you can then go back an delete individual entries, but there
will be one or more that produce the error, with this sort of traceback
(below):

I take it that the email in question (SPAM email) isn't properly
encoded. Any idea on how to get around this problem? In the past I've
gone into the queues and deleted files, etc, but the process isn't easy,
and of course I won't get any cooperation from the SPAMers sending the
messages.

The OS is FreeBSD 4.9 and Mailman is 2.1.6_1, built from source.

========== TRACEBACK START
Dec 11 13:13:52 2005 admin(10012):
@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@
admin(10012): [----- Mailman Version: 2.1.6 -----]
admin(10012): [----- Traceback ------]
admin(10012): Traceback (most recent call last):
admin(10012):   File "/usr/local/mailman/scripts/driver", line 101, in
run_main
admin(10012):     main()
admin(10012):   File "/usr/local/mailman/Mailman/Cgi/admindb.py", line
163, in main
admin(10012):     process_form(mlist, doc, cgidata)
admin(10012):   File "/usr/local/mailman/Mailman/Cgi/admindb.py", line
713, in process_form
admin(10012):     forward, forwardaddr)
admin(10012):   File "/usr/local/mailman/Mailman/ListAdmin.py", line
167, in HandleRequest
admin(10012):     forward, addr)
admin(10012):   File "/usr/local/mailman/Mailman/ListAdmin.py", line
353, in __handlepost
admin(10012):     syslog('vette', note)
admin(10012):   File "/usr/local/mailman/Mailman/Logging/Syslog.py",
line 40, in write
admin(10012):     self.write_ex(kind, msg, args, kws)
admin(10012):   File "/usr/local/mailman/Mailman/Logging/Syslog.py",
line 58, in write_ex
admin(10012):     logf.write(msg + '\n')
admin(10012):   File
"/usr/local/mailman/Mailman/Logging/StampedLogger.py", line 73, in write
admin(10012):     Logger.write(self, "%s %s" % (prefix, msg))
admin(10012):   File "/usr/local/mailman/Mailman/Logging/Logger.py",
line 91, in write
admin(10012):     f.write(msg)
admin(10012): UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character
u'\xf3' in position 99: ordinal not in range(128)
admin(10012): [----- Python Information -----]
admin(10012): sys.version     =   2.4.2 (#2, Nov  7 2005, 19:05:41) 
[GCC 2.95.4 20020320 [FreeBSD]] 
admin(10012): sys.executable  =   /usr/local/bin/python 
admin(10012): sys.prefix      =   /usr/local
admin(10012): sys.exec_prefix =   /usr/local 
admin(10012): sys.path        =   /usr/local
admin(10012): sys.platform    =   freebsd4 
admin(10012): [----- Environment Variables -----]
admin(10012):   HTTP_REFERER:
http://list.uncanny.net/mailman/admindb/wsa-talk
admin(10012):   SERVER_SOFTWARE: Apache/1.3.33 
admin(10012):   SCRIPT_NAME: /mailman/admindb 
admin(10012):   SERVER_SIGNATURE: <ADDRESS>Apache/1.3.33 Server at
list.uncanny.net Port 80</ADDRESS>
admin(10012):   
admin(10012):   REQUEST_METHOD: POST 
admin(10012):   HTTP_KEEP_ALIVE: 300 
admin(10012):   SERVER_PROTOCOL: HTTP/1.1 
admin(10012):   QUERY_STRING:  
admin(10012):   CONTENT_LENGTH: 61108 
admin(10012):   HTTP_ACCEPT_CHARSET: ISO-8859-1, utf-8;q=0.66, *;q=0.66
admin(10012):   HTTP_USER_AGENT: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US;
rv:0.9.2.1) Gecko/20010901
admin(10012):   HTTP_CONNECTION: keep-alive 
admin(10012):   HTTP_COOKIE:
admin(10012):   SERVER_NAME: list.uncanny.net
admin(10012):   REMOTE_ADDR: 192.168.49.49
admin(10012):   PATH_TRANSLATED:
/Web/hosts/list.uncanny.net/public_html/wsa-talk
admin(10012):   SERVER_PORT: 80
admin(10012):   SERVER_ADDR: 192.168.100.225
admin(10012):   DOCUMENT_ROOT: /Web/hosts/list.uncanny.net/public_html
admin(10012):   PYTHONPATH: /usr/local/mailman
admin(10012):   SCRIPT_FILENAME:
/Web/hosts/list.uncanny.net/public_html/mailman/admindb
admin(10012):   SERVER_ADMIN: webmaster at uncanny.net
admin(10012):   HTTP_HOST: list.uncanny.net
admin(10012):   REQUEST_URI: /mailman/admindb/wsa-talk
admin(10012):   HTTP_ACCEPT: text/xml, application/xml,
application/xhtml+xml, text/html;q=0.9, image/png, image/jpeg,
image/gif;q=0.2, text/plain;q=0.8, text/css, */*;q=0.1
admin(10012):   GATEWAY_INTERFACE: CGI/1.1
admin(10012):   REMOTE_PORT: 33142
admin(10012):   HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE: en-us
admin(10012):   CONTENT_TYPE: application/x-www-form-urlencoded
admin(10012):   HTTP_ACCEPT_ENCODING: gzip,deflate,compress,identity
admin(10012):   UNIQUE_ID: Q5yWc8CoZOEAACbkeKA
admin(10012):   PATH_INFO: /wsa-talk
========== TRACEBACK END

-- 
        Edward Elhauge <ee at uncanny.net>
"One allows himself to be fooled once, to be fooled twice; but he
who permits himself always to be fooled remains a fool." -- Rudolf Rocker