It's a plan to redesign the email API so that it can easily manipulate both bytes and strings as needed, with a backward compatibility layer that allows the current API to be used if all you need to do is process strings.  If we're lucky there may be a PyPI package that backports it to 2.x, although there the backward compatibility API will probably only work if you don't ever want to decode the message to unicode :(.

It is a project of the email-sig, but currently I'm the only one actively working on the code.

There are design documents in the wiki:

    http://wiki.python.org/moin/Email%20SIG

the current code (which of course is in the middle of various transformations and the docs aren't completely up to date) is on launchpad in deference to Barry:

    https://launchpad.net/python-email6

I welcome your comments!

(*) email4 is the package in most of the actively used versions of Python2.x, email5 is the version in 3.0/3.1/3.2, email6 will hopefully be the version in 3.3.