[Mailman-Users] Email address with trailing space

[Marion Bates]

Sorry for the antique thread bump here, but it was the top hit for my
"mailman address trailing space" search, so I thought I'd contribute.

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Re: [Mailman-Users] Email address with trailing space

Wed, 10 Jan 2007 10:38:22 -0800

Trader Joe wrote:

>While doing "mass subscription", I accidently put in
>an extra space at the end of several email addresses
>and now I'm unable to unsubscribe or remove these
>email via Web tools.  Anyone know how to remove these?
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I had the same issue -- version 2.1.9 under Fedora Core 9. The email
address had a trailing space, and attempts to delete it via the web
interface resulted in nothing more than a page refresh, with the
address still subscribed; the remove_members script reported "No such
member" whether I passed it the address with a space, an escaped
space, or no space.

A later reply included a now-dead link to part of the FAQ. I looked at
the archived version here:
http://web.archive.org/web/20070221134632/http://www.python.org/cgi-bin/faqw-mm.py?req=show&file=faq03.013.htp

But those suggestions didn't work in my case. So I grepped the
list_members output for just the "correct" part of my bad email
address, and lo and behold, the problematic address looked like this:

user.name at domain.com\&#160

That's the entity code for a non-breaking space, which I imagine ended
up in MM from a copy-paste from rich email.

Leveraging another suggestion in this old thread, I was able to remove
it but had to escape the ampersand:

./remove_members mylistname user.name at domain.com\&#160

In case this is helpful to anyone else. Thanks, all!

-- MB