From: Ellen K. 

Just curious, how are characters that require more than 7 bits encoded into 7-bit?

On Thu, 20 Oct 2005 17:21:58 -0700, "Rich"  wrote in message
:

>   Email content is any encoding you want.  The example you give is valid even
if silly.  It's not a security issue in any case.
>
>   BTW, email is not 7-bit though it is encouraged to be encoded as such
because that provides better compatibility.  There is a standard for
checking for 8-bit compatiblity.  See http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1652.txt. 
It's not necessary since anything can be encoded as 7-bit.  It can be more
efficient.
>
>Rich
>
>  "Geo."  wrote in message
news:4357ff5e$1{at}w3.nls.net...
>  Ok I don't understand so maybe someone can give me a rational explanation of
>  this.
>
>  Why would an email program accept
>
>  Subject: =?ascii?B?W1NQQU1dICBPbmxpbmUgUGF5bWVu?=
>  =?ascii?B?dHMgYW5kIG91ciBzZWN1cmUgc2l0?= =?ascii?B?ZSE=?=
>
>  and decode it to
>
>   [SPAM]  Online Payments and our secure site!
>
>  This just boggles the mind, I mean if you were trying to create secure
>  application wouldn't you restrict to a least common instead of allow
>  everything? Email is 7bit ascii not unicode correct? Is this somehow needed
>  to allow unicode subject line where the RFC's don't allow it?
>
>  Geo. 

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