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

["Martin v. Löwis"]

> 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.

Sure is. Any byte sequence can be interpreted as latin-1.

Not that I think this would be a good thing to do.

> 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?

I don't think so - I assume Barry really wants to use strings as the
data type to represent the internal structure. It works fine for all
aspects except for the 8bit and binary content-transfer-encodings.

Regards,
Martin