I'm using Python 2.7.3rc2 from debian sid packages.

If a mailbox.Maildir object is created with a unicode dirname,
retrieving a message tagged with maildir flags with get() or get_message() fails with the following exception:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "reproduce.py", line 21, in <module>
    mb.get_message(key)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/mailbox.py", line 343, in get_message
    msg.set_info(name.split(self.colon)[-1])
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/mailbox.py", line 1480, in set_info
    raise TypeError('info must be a string: %s' % type(info))
TypeError: info must be a string: <type 'unicode'>


Since python os.path module seems to cope with unicode paths http://docs.python.org/howto/unicode.html, it would be nice to fix this issue.

Attached is a simple script reproducing the bug.

The following patch seems to solve the issue for me:
--- /usr/lib/python2.7/mailbox.py	2012-04-23 01:25:48.000000000 +0200
+++ mailbox.py	2012-05-26 00:34:03.585347627 +0200
@@ -1474,7 +1474,7 @@
 
     def set_info(self, info):
         """Set the message's "info" string."""
-        if isinstance(info, str):
+        if isinstance(info, basestring):
             self._info = info
         else:
             raise TypeError('info must be a string: %s' % type(info))


Regards,

Pablo Oliveira.

This would be considered a new feature, and is thus out of scope for 2.7. An easy workaround is to encode the unicode path to str using the file system encoding first (sys.getfilesystemencoding()).