RFC 2047 specifies a standard way of encoding non US-ASCII characters into a string that identifies both the character set to use and the actual characters. The result of the encoding will be US-ASCII, and can be transmitted in Internet mail and decoded appropriately on the receiving end. This encoding is necessary in the first place because many characters in non-English languages can not be represented in 7-bit ASCII.
There are some mail clients that are not RFC 2047 Compliant, if you are using one of this clients you are strongly encuraged to change your mail client or to update it to a compliant version:
- Eudora 4: Double quote characters are encoded with a Windows codpage and are eight-bit characters. Eudora's MIME headers indicate the MIME type but not 8-bit encoding. Suggest enabling "quoted printable" encoding.
wikipedia.org dumped 2003-03-17 with terodump