Binary data

I was testing dbmail with a Postgresql backend and I ran into an issue
I have with encoding. Dbmail is a database driven email store.

I normally create my databases using the UNICODE encoding. However when
I attempted to transfer email from another imap server, the insert
failed with an "invalid charcter" with a message that obviously
contained an invalid sequence for utf-8 (I suspect).

The table in question is:

Table "messageblks"
Column | Type |
Modifiers
-----------------+--------+-------------------------------------------------------
messageblk_idnr | bigint | not null default
nextval('messageblk_idnr_seq'::text)
message_idnr | bigint | not null default '0'
messageblk | text | not null
blocksize | bigint | not null default '0'

What would be the appropriate type for messageblk ? I was thinking bytea.