[Mailman-Users] Administrative requests oddity

[Mike Avery]

When spammers send junk to my lists, its caught by Mailman and it winds 
up in the administrative requests.

However, some of them put characters in the subject thats out of the 
usual ascii range.  Something like,      §Úªº·s©É¤U§«ô¤Ñ¥X¨Ó¤@¤U

And then when I try to deal with the message, Mailman gives me error 
messages.  It said,


    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.

Looking at the mailman error log, I found,

> Jul 11 17:06:23 2005 admin(82489): 
> @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@
> admin(82489): [----- Mailman Version: 2.1.6 -----]
> admin(82489): [----- Traceback ------]
> admin(82489): Traceback (most recent call last):
> admin(82489):   File "/usr/local/mailman/scripts/driver", line 101, in 
> run_main
> admin(82489):     main()
> admin(82489):   File "/usr/local/mailman/Mailman/Cgi/admindb.py", line 
> 163, in m
> ain
> admin(82489):     process_form(mlist, doc, cgidata)
> admin(82489):   File "/usr/local/mailman/Mailman/Cgi/admindb.py", line 
> 713, in p
> rocess_form
> admin(82489):     forward, forwardaddr)
> admin(82489):   File "/usr/local/mailman/Mailman/ListAdmin.py", line 
> 167, in Han
> dleRequest
> admin(82489):     forward, addr)
> admin(82489):   File "/usr/local/mailman/Mailman/ListAdmin.py", line 
> 353, in __h
> andlepost
> admin(82489):     syslog('vette', note)
> admin(82489):   File "/usr/local/mailman/Mailman/Logging/Syslog.py", 
> line 40, in
>  write
> admin(82489):     self.write_ex(kind, msg, args, kws)
> admin(82489):   File "/usr/local/mailman/Mailman/Logging/Syslog.py", 
> line 58, in
>  write_ex
> admin(82489):     logf.write(msg + '\n')
> admin(82489):   File 
> "/usr/local/mailman/Mailman/Logging/StampedLogger.py", line
>  73, in write
> admin(82489):     Logger.write(self, "%s %s" % (prefix, msg))
> admin(82489):   File "/usr/local/mailman/Mailman/Logging/Logger.py", 
> line 91, in
>  write
> admin(82489):     f.write(msg)
> admin(82489): UnicodeError: ASCII encoding error: ordinal not in 
> range(128)
> admin(82489): [----- Python Information -----]
> admin(82489): sys.version     =   2.2.2 (#1, Mar 22 2003, 15:26:17)
> [GCC 2.95.4 20020320 [FreeBSD]]
> admin(82489): sys.executable  =   /usr/local/bin/python
> admin(82489): sys.prefix      =   /usr/local
> admin(82489): sys.exec_prefix =   /usr/local
> admin(82489): sys.path        =   /usr/local
> admin(82489): sys.platform    =   freebsd4
> admin(82489): [----- Environment Variables -----]
> admin(82489):   PATH_INFO: /rec.food.sourdough
> admin(82489):   HTTP_ACCEPT: 
> text/xml,application/xml,application/xhtml+xml,text
> /html;q=0.9,text/plain;q=0.8,image/png,*/*;q=0.5
> admin(82489):   CONTENT_TYPE: application/x-www-form-urlencoded
> admin(82489):   HTTP_REFERER: 
> http://www.otherwhen.com/mailman/admindb/rec.food.
> sourdough
> admin(82489):   SERVER_SOFTWARE: Apache/1.3.33 (Unix) PHP/4.3.11
> admin(82489):   PYTHONPATH: /usr/local/mailman
> admin(82489):   SCRIPT_FILENAME: /usr/local/mailman/cgi-bin/admindb
> admin(82489):   SERVER_ADMIN: mavery at mail.otherwhen.com
> admin(82489):   SCRIPT_NAME: /mailman/admindb
> admin(82489):   SERVER_SIGNATURE: <ADDRESS>Apache/1.3.33 Server at 
> www.otherwhen
> .com Port 80</ADDRESS>
> admin(82489):
> admin(82489):   REQUEST_METHOD: POST
> admin(82489):   HTTP_HOST: www.otherwhen.com
> admin(82489):   HTTP_KEEP_ALIVE: 300
> admin(82489):   SERVER_PROTOCOL: HTTP/1.1
> admin(82489):   QUERY_STRING:
> admin(82489):   PATH_TRANSLATED: /usr/local/www/data/rec.food.sourdough
> admin(82489):   REQUEST_URI: /mailman/admindb/rec.food.sourdough
> admin(82489):   CONTENT_LENGTH: 191
> admin(82489):   HTTP_ACCEPT_CHARSET: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7
> admin(82489):   HTTP_USER_AGENT: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 
> 5.0; en-US;
>  rv:1.7.8) Gecko/20050511 Firefox/1.0.4
> admin(82489):   HTTP_CONNECTION: keep-alive
> admin(82489):   HTTP_COOKIE: 
> rec.food.sourdough+admin=28020000006978f8d242732800
> 00003865373336373439653535346264353335386636393538313266616536636262376531363062
> 3237; 
> rec.food.baking+admin=28020000006982f9d24273280000006563393331313332303039
> 3865323532396432336166363833616163343230383036343566663937
> admin(82489):   SERVER_NAME: www.otherwhen.com
> admin(82489):   REMOTE_ADDR: 192.168.2.10
> admin(82489):   REMOTE_PORT: 2378
> admin(82489):   HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE: en-us,en;q=0.5
> admin(82489):   UNIQUE_ID: QtL7bsCoAgMAAUIcZas
> admin(82489):   SERVER_PORT: 80
> admin(82489):   GATEWAY_INTERFACE: CGI/1.1
> admin(82489):   HTTP_ACCEPT_ENCODING: gzip,deflate
> admin(82489):   SERVER_ADDR: 192.168.2.3
> admin(82489):   DOCUMENT_ROOT: /usr/local/www/data

The key seems to be the line, "admin(82489): UnicodeError: ASCII 
encoding error: ordinal not in range(128)"

At this point, my work-around is to clear the administrative requests 
from another list and copy the request.pck and pending.pck files from 
the list thats OK to the one that is having problems.

Does anyone have a better workaround?

Thanks,
Mike