MIME Extension for non-ASCII Mail Message Headers

All of the MIME mechanisms discussed up to this point deal with ways of encoding different kinds of ASCII and non-ASCII data into the body of an RFC 822 message. In addition to these capabilities, MIME also includes a way in which non-ASCII data can be encoded into headers of an RFC 822 message.

At this point, you might be wondering why anyone would want to do this. Sure, it makes sense to be able to use MIME to encode binary data such as an image into an email, but why do it in a header? Well, if you can't see the need for this, chances are that you are a native English speaker. ASCII does a great job of representing English, but isn't so good with many other languages. With RFC 822, speakers of ...

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