[Python-3000] should rfc822 accept text io or binary io?

[Bill Janssen]

> Ideally, the package would be well suited not only for wire-to-wire
> and all-internal uses, but also related domains like HTTP and other
> RFC 2822-like contexts.

But that's exactly why the internal representation should be bytes,
not strings.  HTTP's use of MIME, for instance, uses "binary" quite a
lot.

> Internally though, I feel fairly strongly that an email 
> message should be represented as strings, though sometimes (certainly 
> for idempotency) you still need to carry around the charset (i.e.
> encoding).

What if you've got a PNG as one of the multipart components?  With a
Content-Transfer-Encoding of "binary"?  There's no way to represent that
as a string.

I wonder if we're misunderstanding each other here.  The "mail
message" itself is essentially a binary data structure, not a sequence
of strings, though many of its fields consist of carefully specified
string values.  Is that what you're saying?  That when decoding the
message, the fields which are string-valued should be kept as strings
in the internal Python representation of the message?

Bill