Aha. We can remove he string import after all by using ValueError.

diff --git a/Lib/smtplib.py b/Lib/smtplib.py
index b9c7f51ec63c9f9208cfd827c9c76dc5fe6db72e..1af406883a5c51e8d67a457048507f2e87143025 100755 (executable)
--- a/Lib/smtplib.py
+++ b/Lib/smtplib.py
@@ -40,7 +40,6 @@ Example:
 # This was modified from the Python 1.5 library HTTP lib.
 
 import socket
-import string
 import re
 import rfc822
 import types
@@ -209,7 +208,7 @@ class SMTP:
             if i >= 0:
                 host, port = host[:i], host[i+1:]
                 try: port = int(port)
-                except string.atoi_error:
+                except ValueError:
                     raise socket.error, "nonnumeric port"
         if not port: port = SMTP_PORT
         self.sock = socket.socket(socket.AF_INET, socket.SOCK_STREAM)