help with unicode email parse

[neoedmund]

i want to get the subject from email and construct a filename with the
subject.
but tried a lot, always got error like this:
UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xe9 in position 4:
ordinal not in range(128)


	msg = email.message_from_string( text )
	title = decode_header( msg["Subject"] )
	title= title[0][0]
	#title=title.encode("utf8")
	print title
	fn = ""+path+"/"+stamp+"-"+title+".mail"


the variable "text"  come from sth like this:
( header, msg, octets ) = a.retr( i )
text= list2txt( msg )
def list2txt( l ):
	return reduce( lambda x, y:x+"\r\n"+y, l )

anyone can help me out? thanks.