On 13 February 2000, John D. Hardin <jhardin(_at_)wolfenet(_dot_)com> wrote:
On Sat, 12 Feb 2000, Rik Kabel wrote:
The message may be Chinese spam, or a picture of your mother's new
parakeet, or a data file for an important research project.
...only if it's not properly encoded. Such things will be in BASE64 or
UUE.
There's no rule preventing f.i. a GIF file from being encoded as
quoted-printable. A good MUA will automatically encode the file for
you; the same MUA would estimate the size of the encoded file as both
Q-P and Base64, and choose the smallest. As it turns out, in some rare
cases a GIF file _can_ be smaller if encoded as Q-P than as Base64 (yes,
I've actually seen this happening in real life).
On a tangentially related topic, contrary to what Microsoft seems to
think, UUE is _not_ a legal encoding for attachments.
Regards,
Liviu Daia
--
Dr. Liviu Daia e-mail: Liviu(_dot_)Daia(_at_)imar(_dot_)ro
Institute of Mathematics web page: http://www.imar.ro/~daia
of the Romanian Academy PGP key: http://www.imar.ro/~daia/daia.asc