What is yEnc and what is different about it?
yEnc is based on the recognition that not all “non-textual” byte codes are “bad” for the Usenet, but only a few of them. The rest can be posted and processed by Usenet software without any problems. yEnc encodes binary files in two steps: first, it changes each byte by a constant in order to minimise the amount of “bad” bytes in the file. Second, it replaces each “bad” byte with a unique sequence of two bytes. Again, it is a little bit more complex than that, but not much. As far as we know, this process increases the size of the encoded file only by 2-3% on average.
