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format on Usenet?

April 26, 2017format usenet

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format on Usenet?

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News and Mail transfer require that a binary attachment is “encoded” before it is sent. And they are “decoded” after they have been received. Normally all this is done by your newsreader (or mail-program). You dont see it. Most dont even know it. The encoding is necessary because the special methods for the transfer of news & mail (protocols) require it. A message with a binary which is not encoded is corrupted during transmission – or transmission is denied at all. Transport of messages by News and Mail was restricted to US-ASCII characters when the protocols were written (20 years ago). These services have been created to transport only plain US-text. Special characters (control-characters, symbols, non-US-characters) were forbidden – and used for special purposes. But because people wanted to send also binary attachments by News and Mail some ‘tricks’ were implemented: The binary was changed to “allowed US-ASCII-characters” before transmission (encoding) – and back to a binary after