Re: Issues when reading mailboxes from alioth-lists.debian.net

[Gregor Riepl <onitake@gmail.com>]

>   File "/usr/lib/python3.8/mailbox.py", line 781, in get_message
>     msg.set_from(from_line[5:].decode('ascii'))
> UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xe2 in position 37: ordinal not in range(128)
> Exit code:   1 
> 
> IMHO it is a bug if those mailboxes can't be read.  Am I missing
> something?

I would humbly suggest that the Python2 version is silently ignoring an
encoding error here.

RFC 4155 states that the "default" mbox format is strictly 7-bit-safe
(usually ASCII), but mboxes may also be in a "local" format with
different or even mixed encodings.

Since mailbox only seems to accepts the "default" mbox format, then it's
very well possible that the Alioth mboxes are *not* in this format,
strictly speaking.