On Fri, Oct 31, 2003 at 11:10:22AM -0500, Sharma, Amit wrote:
>
> I would think that encoding is necessary for the similar reason why we do
> MIME encoding/ base64 encoding prior to transmission. Though am not an
> expert to comment on this, however, we have faced problems if data is sent
> over network and involving multi OS without encoding the binary content.

Encoding of mails is required because the mail protocol (SMTP)
explicitly limits data to 7-bit ASCII. This restriction is not
present in the HTTP protocol, and thus no encoding is needed.

The underlying transport protocol (TCP/IP) also supports pure binary
data without any encoding. So actually mail/SMTP is the exception.

-- 
Henrik Storner <henrik_at_hswn.dk> 
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