Welcome to the GNU Mailman shell >>> import os >>> import pickle >>> for root, dirs, files in os.walk('/var/lib/mailman3/messages'): ... for fn in files: ... print(fn) ... with open(os.path.join(root, fn), 'rb') as fp: ... msg = pickle.load(fp) ... print(msg['Message-ID']) ... x = msg.as_string() ... Q5PQZI4QEE4C42XNZMXESSKDCSZBUT4T <1BFDD85F.4335D1D5@gmail.com> Traceback (most recent call last): File "", line 7, in File "/usr/lib/python3.6/email/message.py", line 158, in as_string g.flatten(self, unixfrom=unixfrom) File "/usr/lib/python3.6/email/generator.py", line 116, in flatten self._write(msg) File "/usr/lib/python3.6/email/generator.py", line 181, in _write self._dispatch(msg) File "/usr/lib/python3.6/email/generator.py", line 214, in _dispatch meth(msg) File "/usr/lib/python3.6/email/generator.py", line 243, in _handle_text msg.set_payload(payload, charset) File "/usr/lib/python3.6/email/message.py", line 315, in set_payload payload = payload.encode(charset.output_charset) UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character '\ufffd' in position 467: ordinal not in range(128) >>>