I use imap-tools to access my emails.

My problem is that I’m trying to access emails sent from someone whose email contains special characters like ø which I can’t encode correctly because from_ accepts a string as input, so I am not getting anywhere.

import imap_tools

with imap_tools.MailBox('imap.gmx.net').login(email, password, 'INBOX') as mailbox:
    for msg in mailbox.fetch(imap_tools.AND(from_ = 'beskeder@mød.dk')):
        print('Found')

I shortend my code. I am expecting my program to print Found when the email sent by beskeder@mød.dk is found in my mailbox. Other emails with no special characters are found.

The error message:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/Users/user/Desktop/test.py", line 4, in <module>
    for msg in mailbox.fetch(imap_tools.AND(from_ = 'beskeder@mød.dk')):
  File "/Users/user/Library/Python/3.9/lib/python/site-packages/imap_tools/mailbox.py", line 130, in fetch
    nums = tuple((reversed if reverse else iter)(self.numbers(criteria, charset)))[limit_range]
  File "/Users/user/Library/Python/3.9/lib/python/site-packages/imap_tools/mailbox.py", line 67, in numbers
    encoded_criteria = criteria if type(criteria) is bytes else str(criteria).encode(charset)
UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character 'xf8' in position 17: ordinal not in range(128)

I tried to add 'beskeder@hottemøder.dk'.encode('ascii', 'ignore') but it’s not working either.