Encoding trouble when script called from application

[Florian Lindner]

Hello!

I'm using python 3.2.3 on debian wheezy. My script is called from my mail delivery agent (MDA) maildrop (like procmail) through it's xfilter directive.

Script works fine when used interactively, e.g. ./script.py < testmail but when called from maildrop it's producing an infamous UnicodeDecodeError:

File "/home/flindner/flofify.py", line 171, in main
     mail = sys.stdin.read()
File "/usr/lib/python3.2/encodings/ascii.py", line 26, in decode
     return codecs.ascii_decode(input, self.errors)[0]

Exception for example is always like

UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0x82 in position 869: ordinal not in range(128) 
UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xc3 in position 1176: ordinal not in range(128)
UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0x8c in position 846: ordinal not in range(128)

I read mail from stdin "mail = sys.stdin.read()"

Environment when called is:

locale.getpreferredencoding(): ANSI_X3.4-1968
environ["LANG"]: C

System environment when using shell is:

~ % echo $LANG
en_US.UTF-8

As far as I know when reading from stdin I don't need an decode(...) call, since stdin has a decoding. I also tried some decoding/encoding stuff but changed nothing.

Any ideas to help me?

Thanks!
Florian