Many MAPI calls have an ulFlags parameter that can be passed to control various things inside the call. The python interface supports all the flags that would normally be passed to the MAPI c+\+ interface, since it is just and int that is blindly transferred to MAPI. However there is one flag, MAPI_UNICODE, that has a direct affect on how the passed parameters are passed to MAPI. See the character sets and unicode part later in this document.