[Mailman-Users] UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte

[Mark Sapiro]

Steve Burling wrote:

>Almost a year ago, in 
><http://mail.python.org/pipermail/mailman-users/2005-April/043992.html>, 
>Mark Sapiro wrote (in response to a question about this error):
>
>> This error caused the message to be shunted (placed in the shunt
>> queue). You can run bin/unshunt to reprocess the message, but unless
>> you change the character set of the list language first, the error
>> will occur again and the message will be shunted again.
>>
>> To change the character set to e.g. western european, you can put
>>
>> add_language('en',    'English (USA)',       'iso-8859-1')
>>
>> in mm_cfg.py and then do
>>
>> bin/mailmanctl restart
>>
>> followed by
>>
>> bin/unshunt
>
>Is there any downside to making this change?  I notice that iso-8859-1 is 
>the standard charset for the majority of the languages listed in Defaults.py
>
>(As you can probably guess, I'm seeing the above error...)


I'm not aware of any real downside, but there may be one I'm not aware
of.

However, that response was to a specific occurrence of this exception
in Decorate.py. If you are seeing this exception with a different
traceback, changing the language character set won't eliminate the
exception.

A more common cause of the exception is non-encoded, non-ascii
characters in the message Subject:, and that won't be fixed by this
change. Note that such messages are almost always spam.

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