[Mailman-Users] New install: Uncaught runner exception: nothing torepeat

[Mark Sapiro]

Dwight Tovey wrote:
>
>Next I go in to the list info page and sign up.  The confirmation message
>succesfully goes out.  I then confirm the subscription (either by clicking
>on the supplied link or sending back a reply) and from the logs I can see
>that Mailman tries to send out a notification to the list admin.  However,
>that message never gets out.  In the Mailman error log, I see the
>following:
>
>===============================8<-----------------------------------------
>Oct 21 22:04:30 2005 (22115) Traceback (most recent call last):
>  File "/usr/local/mailman/Mailman/Queue/Runner.py", line 111, in _oneloop
>    self._onefile(msg, msgdata)
>  File "/usr/local/mailman/Mailman/Queue/Runner.py", line 167, in _onefile
>    keepqueued = self._dispose(mlist, msg, msgdata)
>  File "/usr/local/mailman/Mailman/Queue/IncomingRunner.py", line 130, in
>_dispose
>    more = self._dopipeline(mlist, msg, msgdata, pipeline)
>  File "/usr/local/mailman/Mailman/Queue/IncomingRunner.py", line 153, in
>_dopipeline
>    sys.modules[modname].process(mlist, msg, msgdata)
>  File "/usr/local/mailman/Mailman/Handlers/SpamDetect.py", line 98, in
>process
>    cre = re.compile(regex, re.IGNORECASE)
>  File "/usr/lib/python2.3/sre.py", line 179, in compile
>    return _compile(pattern, flags)
>  File "/usr/lib/python2.3/sre.py", line 229, in _compile
>    raise error, v # invalid expression
>error: nothing to repeat
>
>Oct 21 22:04:30 2005 (22115) SHUNTING:
>1129867468.9166019+626355503683f18064d71e00212f9824c933a999
>===============================8<-----------------------------------------
>
>I know nothing about Python, so I'm not completely sure what's going on
>here, but it looks like a bad regular expression somewhere.  I wouldn't be
>too surprised if I have something completely wrong in the configuration,
>but I have no idea where to look.

You're almost there. If you look at lines 97 and 98 in
/usr/local/mailman/Mailman/Handlers/SpamDetect.py, you'll see

    for header, regex in mm_cfg.KNOWN_SPAMMERS:
        cre = re.compile(regex, re.IGNORECASE)

Thus, the bad regex is in the KNOWN_SPAMMERS list in mm_cfg.py.

Note that the format of this list is for example

KNOWN_SPAMMERS = [
    ('subject', '.*[s$]ex'),
    ('header2', 'regex2'),
    ('header3', 'regex3')
    ]

Also, see the discussion in Defaults.py about KNOWN_SPAMMERS in
Defaults.py. It may be preferable to use Privacy options...Spam
filters in the list configuration.

-- 
Mark Sapiro <msapiro at value.net>       The highway is for gamblers,
San Francisco Bay Area, California    better use your sense - B. Dylan