Can anyone help with sending non-Ascii messages?

Question

I'm currently writing a small application that sends and receives encoded messages through JavaMail. Here's the problem: each character in the string that I'm sending can be up to 11 bits long and I'm apparently losing accuracy while emailing encoded text.
Apparently, JavaMail treats Strings as a series of bytes, while Java treats Strings as a series of integers. When I try
String message = "Message to code";
message = encodeMessage(message);
message = decodeMessage(message);
and then print out the contents of message, I get the correct contents of message. However, when I try
String message = "Message to code";
message = encodeMessage(message);
Message msg;
msg.setContent(message, "text/plain");
and then receive the message and read the contents, the contents are changed. I tried a for/while loop to see what the string "message" was holding before and after I emailed it. The results:
Before:
Encoded text as integers: 74 196 478 1006 1921
After:
Decoded text as integers: 74 196 63 63 63 13 10
Can anyone give me suggestions on how I can send this data without losing accuracy? I had the idea of sending an int[] array, but I can't see an easy way of doing that... I'm fairly new to JavaMail, so any help is greatly appreciated :-)
Thanks,
Robert Chatham

Answer 1

I've figured out a solution only to come up with an even more bizarre problem. JavaMail is now inserting random bytes into my message.
My code:
(When sending the email):
String encodedMessage;
msg.setContent(encodedMessage);
(When receiving the email):
String encodedMessage = (String)msg.getContent();
I've printed out a list of the bytes in each string immediately before sending the encoded message and immediately after receiving the encoded message. I'm doing absolutely nothing to the message between the times I send and receive it (and I don't think there's a way to, considering that it's off at the mail server.)
Take a look at a sample of the bytes of the encoded message before sending and after receiving (I added parenthesis for emphasis):
0 74 1 96 4 78 10 6 19 21 18 87 17 65 14 13 7
0 74 1 96 4 78 (13) 10 6 19 21 18 87 17 65 14 13 (10) 7
So... what is causing these extra bytes to be inserted into my message? In ascii format, the two bytes represent (I believe) line feed and form feed - but why inserted, and why so randomly?
Thanks,
Robert