SQLSTATE[HY000]: General error: 1366 Incorrect string value

Please help. I get this error while executing Model::create($attributes)

My database encoding IS utf8mb4 and collation is utf8mb4_unicode_ci

I have tried many suggestions such as rerun migrations, set name utf8 etc. Browsed previously asked similar questions for good few days - Nothing helps.. Please suggest what am i missing?

I will break the process down:

• It is Laravel 5.8 project
• I am using barbushin/php-imap package to fetch emails and store them to database.

This is the code:

public static function read()
{
    /**
     * Fetch emails
     */
    $mailbox = new \PhpImap\Mailbox(
        '{'.config('imap.host').':'.config('imap.port').'/'.config('imap.protocol').'/'.config('imap.encryption').'/novalidate-cert}INBOX',
        ''.config('imap.username').'',
        ''.config('imap.password').'',
        storage_path('app/public/helpdesk'));

    $ids = $mailbox->searchMailbox('ALL');

    if($ids) {

        foreach ($ids as $id) {

            $message = $mailbox->getMail($id);

            $task = Task::create([
                'uuid' => $uuid,
                'subject' => $message->subject,
                'description' => $message->textHtml,
                'from_name' => $message->fromName,
                'from_email' => $message->fromAddress,
                'task_type' => $type,
                'task_status' => $status,
                'start_at' => Carbon::now(),
                'due_at' => Carbon::now()->addDays(1),
            ]);

            $mailbox->deleteMail($id);
        }

    }

}

I successfully fetch emails, however when they contain non utf caracters (Lithuanian) in my case - i get an error

SQLSTATE[HY000]: General error: 1366 Incorrect string value

I have tried all sorts of encoding functions to preprocess text, however all i get is ? sybmols instead of actual letters OR the error...

via Chebli Mohamed