Why encode to ascii? If you want to turn a unicode string into a bytestring you use `.encode('utf8')`.

Also, `strict` is the default so you can omit that. 

I would opt to use `email = report['email'].encode('utf-8')` instead. 

Also, if you have a problem with `.encode()` it would raise a `UnicodeEncodeError`. Not `UnicodeDecodeError`. 

see:

```python
>>> u'\xa9@foo.com'.encode('ascii')
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\xa9' in position 0: ordinal not in range(128)
>>> u'\xa9@foo.com'.encode('utf8')
'\xc2\xa9@foo.com'
```