message headers are similarly encoded per utf- if they are non-ascii when sentso they will work in the full email text in factif you study this closely you'll find that the subject here was originally encoded per russian unicode scheme but is utf- now-its new representation yields the same characters (code pointswhen decoded for display in shortalthough the gui itself is still in english (its labels and the like)the content of emails displayed and sent support arbitrary character sets decoding for display is done per content where possibleusing message headers for text payloads and content for headers encoding for sends is performed according to user settings and policiesusing user settings or inputsor utf- default required mime and email header encodings are implemented in largely automatic fashion by the underlying email package not shown here are the pop-up dialogs that may be issued to prompt for text part encoding preferences on sends if so configured in mailconfigand pyedit' similar prompts under certain user configurations some of these user configurations are meant for illustration and generalitythe presets seem to work well for most scenarios 've run intobut your international mileage may vary for more detailsexperiment with the file' messages on your own and see the system' source code the pymailgui client