This is the test case that fails in python 2.4.1:
from email.MIMEText import MIMEText
msg =
MIMEText(u'\u043a\u0438\u0440\u0438\u043b\u0438\u0446\u0430')
msg.set_charset('utf-8')
msg.as_string()

And attached is a patch to correct it.

Your proposed patch doesn't seem to work in Python 2.5, or the trunk (i.e. it won't prevent an exception from occuring). Can you please revise it?

How about this version?

It was proposed to rewrite MIMEText in Python 3.1 (and 2.7?) to use 
unicode characters in the internals and reconvert to bytes to send it 
to a socket (or a file).

The patch by maxua works fine with 2.6 too and solves the problem.
I'd suggest it be applied to the 2.6 branch, even if email is rewriten
for 2.7/3.x.

What is the status of this?

It looks to me like MIMEText doesn't actually support unicode input.  .

One way to get the example to work is to do this:

 MIMEText(u'\u043a\u0438\u0440\u0438\u043b\u0438\u0446\u0430'.encode('utf-8'), 'plain', 'utf-8')

The above call produces valid output from as_string:

'Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"\nMIME-Version:
1.0\nContent-Transfer-Encoding: base64\n\n0LrQuNGA0LjQu9C40YbQsA==\n'

How you'd get it to use 8bit, I have no idea.  Still, I'm inclined to
close this as invalid unless Barry tells me my analysis is wrong.

(CF: http://mg.pov.lt/blog/unicode-emails-in-python for a good example
of handling unicode using the email package, which I found after
figuring out the above.)

Clearly, the documentation of this could be better, but I suspect the
developers would rather spend their time fixing the email module in py3.
 A doc patch would certainly be accepted.  (Maybe someone could ask the
above blogger if we could borrow his example for the docs.)