XML_RPC and unicode problems

[Thomas]

I am currently passing email messages over XML_RPC as the payload for
a certain function call. On some of these messages, XML_RPC blows up
on the server side and says something to the effect of:

exceptions.UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf8' codec can't decode byte 0xa0 in
position 1599: unexpected code byte

Using the native Python codec for doing conversions gives me a similar
error ('utf8' codec can't decode byte 0x93 in position 1328:
unexpected code byte). That gives me the feeling that these specific
messages are just funky. (Looking at the location in the file that
they are choking seems to be random characters)

What I've come to believe is that XML_RPC automatically assumes any
strings it transfers are unicode and thusly tries to do conversions on
these strings. Therefore, is there any way to keep XML_RPC from doing
unicode conversions, or is there some way for me to just pass raw data
over XML_RPC without having to worry about it?