Python Error when Mail merging

[watchthedot]

I’m trying to do an email Mailmerge with LibreOffice 3.4.4 (OOO340m1 (Build:402)) on Linux Mint 12.04 (64-bit) and am getting the following error when it tries to send, following a successful link to the server:

<type 'exceptions.UnicodeEncodeError'>: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\xa0' in position 9: ordinal not in range(128), traceback follows
  /usr/lib/python2.7/socket.py:224 in function meth() [return getattr(self._sock,name)(*args)]
  /usr/lib/python2.7/smtplib.py:321 in function send() [self.sock.sendall(str)]
  /usr/lib/python2.7/smtplib.py:334 in function putcmd() [self.send(str)]
  /usr/lib/python2.7/smtplib.py:477 in function rcpt() [self.putcmd("rcpt", "TO:%s%s" % (quoteaddr(recip), optionlist))]
  /usr/lib/python2.7/smtplib.py:725 in function sendmail() [(code, resp) = self.rcpt(each, rcpt_options)]
  /usr/lib/libreoffice/basis-link/program/mailmerge.py:225 in function sendMailMessage() [self.server.sendmail(sendermail, truerecipients, msg.as_string())]

Driving me nuts! Anyone able to give me some pointers on solving this problem?

[caolan]

Your version of 3.4.4 has been configured to use the system python of your Mint distro

I believe the problem there is basically that of http://bugs.python.org/issue4768
i.e. your problem is similar to that of https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=36763

If so, try filing a bug against your distribution and point them to this commit
http://cgit.freedesktop.org/libreoffice/core/commit/?id=91be79
as a likely fix.

[watchthedot]

Thanks for this. Is there a workaround do you know? I need to get these emails out today! I have no experience of python, so would have no idea how to patch this myself