Unable to remove a mail alias or to update the mail password: Invalid or unsupported Unicode character or escape sequence found in string

Symptoms

• Going to Domains > example.com > Mail > jdoe@example.com > Email Aliases contains an Email alias with NONASCII characters (like umlaut ä, ö, ü letters or symbols like "♥" or random sequences with leading "\u")

• Unable to remove the mail alias with NONASCII characters or to update the mail password, it fails with the following error message:

  PLESK_ERROR: Error: mailmng-core failed: mailmng[850001]: Session mail DB info parsing error: Invalid or unsupported Unicode character or escape sequence found in string. UTF8 encoded characters and '\u' escape sequences are not supported. Error occured at offset 183, character '\'.
  Fatal error: std::runtime_error(Failed to read and parse session mail data from STDIN. See mail log for details.)

• Trying to rename the mail alias with NONASCII characters fails with the following error message:

  PLESK_ERROR: Error: mailmng-outgoing failed: ERROR:outgoing: You must not use 8-bit bytestrings unless you use a text_factory that can interpret 8-bit bytestrings (like text_factory = str). It is highly recommended that you instead just switch your application to Unicode strings.
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Cause

This is a Plesk bug with ID #PPP-46470 which will be fixed in future Plesk versions.

Note: Subscribe to this article to get notified once the fix will become available.

Resolution

1. Connect to the server via SSH

2. Create Plesk database backup:

   # plesk db dump psa > psa.backup.sql

3. Access Plesk database

4. Find all the mail aliases with NONASCII characters (like umlaut ä, ö, ü letters, characters with accent or symbols like "♥" or random sequences with leading "\u"):

   # plesk db "select ma.id as 'Mail Alias ID',ma.alias as 'Mail Alias', m.mail_name as 'Mail Domain',d.name as 'Domain' from mail m, mail_aliases ma, domains d where d.id=m.dom_id and ma.mn_id=m.id and ma.alias regexp '[^ -~]'"
   +---------------+------------+-------------+-------------+
   | Mail Alias ID | Mail Alias | Mail Domain | Domain |
   +---------------+------------+-------------+-------------+
   | 7 | ülises | noreply | example.com |
   +---------------+------------+-------------+-------------+

5. Delete mail alias including NONASCII characters:

   # plesk db "delete from mail_aliases where id = 7"

6. Repair Mail:

   # plesk repair mail example.com