| Here are Usenet comments from the the 1994 comp.mail.mime thread "Q: why base64 ,not UUencode?" 1) https://www.usenetarchives.com/view.php?id=comp.mail.mime&mi... > Some of the characters used by uuencode cannot be represented in some of the mail systems used to carry rfc 822 (and therefore MIME) mail messages. Using uuencode in these environments causes corruption of encoded data. The working group that developed MIME felt that reliability of the encoding scheme was more important that compatibility with uuencode. In a followup (same link): > "The only character translation problem I have encountered is that the back-quote (`) does not make it through all mailers and becomes a space ( )." A followup from that at https://www.usenetarchives.com/view.php?id=comp.mail.mime&mi... says: > The back-quote problem is only one of many. Several of the characters used by uuencode are not present in (for example) the EBCDIC character set. So a message transmitted over BITNET could get mangled -- especially for traffic between two different countries where they use different versions of EBCDIC, and therefore different translate tables between EBCDIC and ASCII. There are other character sets used by 822-based mail systems that impose similar restrictions, but EBCDIC is the most obvious one. > We didn't use uuencode because several members of our working group had experience with cases where uuencoded files were garbaged in transit. It works fine for some people, but not for "everybody" (or even "nearly everybody"). > The "no standards for uuencode" wasn't really a problem. If we had wanted to use uuencode, we would have documented the format in the MIME RFC. That last comment was from Keith Moore, "the author and co-author of several IETF RFCs related to the MIME and SMTP protocols for electronic mail, among others" says https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keith_Moore . |