Just wanted to throw out something that to me wasn’t obvious.
We ran into an issue today where our send was crashing. Nothing crazy about the code something like
message = Message()
message.subject = "headache"
message.content = message_content
sender.send(message)
And then we crashed… :
UnicodeDecodeError: ‘utf8’ codec can’t decode byte 0xb6 in position 31: invalid start byte
What most people would ask would be.. well what is your content? It was a string, but it was a unicode string and the api handles those differently. So set message_content to:
message_content=u'Et tu brute?'
And your test will crash. Basically this issue generally isn’t experienced because people use the content and subject arguments of the Message() constructor
message = Message(content=u'Et tu brute?')
When you do this, it will "infer" the content_type from the content provided. It just happens that for regular strings it will set the content_type to None. If we would have passed our content to the constructor it would have set the content_type to "text/plain" because the content is a unicode string.
So in our example above we needed to do:
message = Message()
message.subject = "headache"
message.content = message_content
message.content_type="text/plain"
#or we could do getType(message.content) its inside of the messaging module
sender.send(message)
#no crash.
To me this is an annoyance, esp when dealing with strings in python… just wanted to throw it out there before someone else experiences the same issue I have.
A final note is when printing messages
message = Message()
message.subject = "headache"
message.content = message_content
print message
message.content_type="text/plain"
print message
Prints out something like:
> Message(subject=’headache’, content_type=None, content=u’secret content’)
> Message(subject=’headache’, content=u’secret content’)
Notice that there is a "content_type" property in the first, and not the second… why you might ask? Well it only prints out the content_type IF your content_type DOESN’T match your content…. I did not know this until after this horrific finding but now that I know, this is a huge red flag, that something is wrong with your message.
Simple Thoughts 
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