id	summary	reporter	owner	description	type	status	component	version	severity	resolution	keywords	cc	stage	has_patch	needs_docs	needs_tests	needs_better_patch	easy	ui_ux
20230	Can't send unicode email (HTML emails using EmailMultiAlternatives)	James Addison		"This is directly related to https://code.djangoproject.com/ticket/19107, but the steps differ:

{{{
from django.core.mail.message import EmailMultiAlternatives

# the character is some sort of fancy dash/hyphen
subject = body_text = body_html = u'\u2013'
e = EmailMultiAlternatives(subject, body_text, 'from@example.com', ['to@example.com'])
e.attach_alternative(body_html, 'text/html')
e.send()
}}}

This results:

{{{
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File ""<console>"", line 1, in <module>
  File ""/home/chatterblockteam/live/lib/python2.6/site-packages/django/core/mail/message.py"", line 255, in send
    return self.get_connection(fail_silently).send_messages([self])
  File ""/home/chatterblockteam/live/lib/python2.6/site-packages/django/core/mail/backends/smtp.py"", line 95, in send_messages
    sent = self._send(message)
  File ""/home/chatterblockteam/live/lib/python2.6/site-packages/django/core/mail/backends/smtp.py"", line 113, in _send
    force_bytes(message.as_string(), charset))
  File ""/home/chatterblockteam/live/lib/python2.6/site-packages/django/core/mail/message.py"", line 169, in as_string
    g.flatten(self, unixfrom=unixfrom)
  File ""/usr/lib/python2.6/email/generator.py"", line 84, in flatten
    self._write(msg)
  File ""/usr/lib/python2.6/email/generator.py"", line 109, in _write
    self._dispatch(msg)
  File ""/usr/lib/python2.6/email/generator.py"", line 135, in _dispatch
    meth(msg)
  File ""/usr/lib/python2.6/email/generator.py"", line 201, in _handle_multipart
    g.flatten(part, unixfrom=False)
  File ""/usr/lib/python2.6/email/generator.py"", line 84, in flatten
    self._write(msg)
  File ""/usr/lib/python2.6/email/generator.py"", line 109, in _write
    self._dispatch(msg)
  File ""/usr/lib/python2.6/email/generator.py"", line 135, in _dispatch
    meth(msg)
  File ""/usr/lib/python2.6/email/generator.py"", line 178, in _handle_text
    self._fp.write(payload)
UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\u2013' in position 0: ordinal not in range(128)
}}}

As with the referenced ticket above, the root cause must lie with http://bugs.python.org/issue1368247; python 2.7.x works fine while 2.6.5 (on our production server running Ubuntu 10.04) it does the above.  I assume that a similar fix is needed for attachments and not just text.  I wonder if subject and to/from lines are similarly problematic?"	Bug	closed	Core (Mail)	1.5	Normal	wontfix		carsten.fuchs@…	Accepted	0	1	0	0	0	0