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.