4.22. Messages that are translated from HTML to plain text have a body like ""/root/8e8Ta4: Permission denied"

Chances are you are running Mailman on a Red Hat version of Linux ...

Turns out that Red Hat decided to change the temporary directory that lynx uses to be the users home directory. Since qrunner is suid to mailman, the processes environment information it runs with is not actually mailman's (home directory, etc) ... so if you start qrunner when signed on as root, the processes home directory is still root's home directory (in my case '/root').... so, you have a process that has a home directory that it has no authority to write to.

To fix the problem, we have to change the temporary directory that lynx uses.

Change the HTML_TO_PLAIN_TEXT_COMMAND to the following ...

HTML_TO_PLAIN_TEXT_COMMAND = 'LYNX_TEMP_SPACE=/tmp /usr/bin/lynx -force_html -dump %(filename)s'

This causes the temporary directory that lynx will use to be /tmp (which, btw, is the default for a freshly built lynx).

(thanks to John Buttery for the modified lynx command)

A similar problem may occur in Mailman installations on cPanel with CentOS 4.6 (and possible others). In this case, there is no error message; rather, the message sent to the list is blank after being translated from HTML to plain text. The cause appears to be the same and the above fix applies.

Converted from the Mailman FAQ Wizard

This is one of many Frequently Asked Questions.