Characters aren't displayed correctly

[Hussein B]

Hey,
I'm retrieving records from MySQL database that contains non english
characters.
Then I create a String that contains HTML markup and column values
from the previous result set.
+++++
markup = u'''<table>.....'''
for row in rows:
     markup = markup + '<tr><td>' + row['id']
markup = markup + '</table>
+++++
Then I'm sending the email according to this tip:
http://code.activestate.com/recipes/473810/
Well, the email contains ????? characters for each non english ones.
Any ideas?
Ubuntu 8.04
Python 2.5.2
Evolution Mail Client
Thanks.