[ why i do not like base64]

[Ian Malone]

On 21 January 2012 14:10, Tim <ignored_mailbox at yahoo.com.au> wrote:
> On Sat, 2012-01-21 at 13:07 +0000, Ian Malone wrote:
>> Base64 expands (necessarily since it tries to represent full octets
>> with a subset), http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base64#MIME there isn't
>> much of a rationale for using it in email text (though encoding is
>> required for binary attachments), its main purpose seems to be
>> obfuscating the text to make it harder to scan.
>
> There's plenty of languages that cannot be represented with a 7-bit
> character set, so must use an 8-bit set (with UTF8, for instance being
> multiple 8bit groups, when needed).  When you try to email 8-bit, you've
> got a few choices:
>

Well yes, what I nearly said, but decided not to get into, was that
UTF-7 and quoted-printable+UTF-8 are more suitable for text (unless
you're using non-western scripts). Years ago base64 content was one
technique spammers used to get past filters, but I'd hope modern
scanners just decode it. However the inevitable expansion and
rendering the source content unreadable still argue against its use
here. Though it is of course perfectly valid and a sensible choice for
transporting binary data.

-- 
imalone