I would like to see the second option (allow both, warning on non-ascii)

On 17 June 2018 at 21:03, Tal Einat <report@bugs.python.org> wrote:

>
> Tal Einat <taleinat@gmail.com> added the comment:
>
> > And yes, by binary passwords I mean that the module needs to support
> being passed a bytes-like object as the password, since clearly there are
> servers "in the wild" that support non-ascii passwords and the only way to
> be sure one can send the server the correct password is by treating it as a
> series of bytes.  The library caller will have to be responsible for
> picking the correct encoding based on local knowledge.
>
> Perhaps we should make smtplib accept only bytes, passing on the
> responsibility of using an appropriate encoding to its users?  This seems
> like the most straightforward and transparent choice. It would not be
> backwards-compatible, though.
>
> Alternatively, we could change smtplib to accept passwords as bytes or
> strings, but raise an informative exception when given strings with
> non-ASCII characters.  As now, users could be surprised if they have been
> passing passwords as string and hadn't tested their use of smtplib with
> non-ASCII passwords.  We'd just improve the exception and documentation to
> clarify the situation.
>
> ----------
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> <https://bugs.python.org/issue29750>
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