diff --git a/gpgmymail b/gpgmymail
index 4329858..e7c6073 100755
--- a/gpgmymail
+++ b/gpgmymail
@@ -61,7 +61,7 @@ def decode_email(message: email.message.Message) -> email.message.Message:
     # string but i couldn't get it to work any other way
     # decoding needed:
     # as_string() gives us str, encode() gives us bytes
-    decoded_bytes = message.as_string().encode()
+    decoded_bytes = message.as_bytes()
     decoded_bytes = quopri.decodestring(decoded_bytes)
 
     # replace any instances of the Content-Transfer-Encoding header
@@ -108,8 +108,10 @@ def decode_email(message: email.message.Message) -> email.message.Message:
         b'Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64',
         b'Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit'
     )
-
-    return email.message_from_bytes(decoded_bytes)
+    
+    # if i do message_from_bytes it bizarrely changes it back to base64?
+    # utf-8 has encoding issues so do latin1
+    return email.message_from_string(decoded_bytes.decode("latin1"))
 
 def encrypt(
         message: email.message.Message,