Thanks.  I should be able to look at this tomorrow.

You are correct about the fact that Message currently doesn't do any decoding.  That is part of the design: you get the string out of Message and use the helper decoding functions (decode_header, getaddresses, etc) to get actual usable data out of it.

Part of the email6 design addresses this with a new API that will make it much easier to get at the parsed data (methods on a header object returned from msg['xxx']).  But for the current package the way it works it the way it is supposed to work ;)