[LukeShu]

> We were also obsessed with efficiency. base64 was "sold" as denser encoding. I can't say if it was true overall

uuencode has file headers/footers, like MIME. But the actual content encoding is basically base64 with a different alphabet; both add precisely 1/3 overhead (plus up to 2 padding bytes at the end).

[cratermoon]

uuencode has some additional overhead, namely 2 additional bytes per line, that means it varies from 60-70%, the latter being best case, while base64 is 75% efficient in all cases.