In the early days of encrypted mail (e.g. PGP), encoding the mail using base64 was one of the few ways to make sure that none of the intervening MTA's would mess with your message body (which was important if it was being relayed via Bitnet, X.400, MAPI, etc)... and affect the crypto- checksum of the message.
Some of the ASCII => EBCDIC => ASCII encodings were lossy, and some X.400 transports would strip trailing spaces before a newline, etc. I don't know if this problems were ever eliminated or the other transports simply became extinct through natural selection (though it seems to me that Exchange stores messages natively in a non-RFC 822 format). So the short answer is that yes, it's legitimate to send text as base64, but it usually only happens in a very limited set of circumstances. -Philip Rob McEwen (PowerView Systems) wrote: >Is there ever a legit reason to Base64 encode plain text? > >For various reasons which I won't go into now, I'm thinking about decoding and >overwriting the original Base64 encoded text with its decoded text and then >leaving the message that way (whether caught spam or ham). > >Any thoughts? > >Rob McEwen >PowerView Systems >[EMAIL PROTECTED] >(478) 475-9032 > > >
