Thanks Martin, The "Some Chinese characters" are loaded from a MySQL table and are encoded in GB2312 format.
I've added the following line at the top of the code: # -*- coding: GB2312 -*- I've also added the following line into the code: h = Header(subject.encode('GB2312'), 'GB2312') Note that the 'subject' variable consists of GB2312 encoded text, so I am not sure if it is necessary to call the subject.encode('GB2312') method. When I try to execute this code, I get the following error: File "/home/web88/html/app/test.py", line 17, in Header(subject.encode('GB2312'), 'GB2312') LookupError: unknown encoding: GB2312 Any idea what may be wrong? -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list