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Background

The Internet provides us with a fast and reliable means of user-to-user message delivery, using private email or newsgroups. Both systems have originally been designed to transport plain-text messages. Over the years, some methods appeared allowing transport of arbitrary binary data by ``encoding'' the data into plain-text messages. But after these years, there are still certain problems handling the encoded data, and many recipients have difficulties decoding the messages back into their original form.

It should be the job of the mail delivery agent to handle sending and rend receiving binary data transparently. However, the support of most applications is limited, and several incompatibilities among different software exists.

There are three common formats for encoding binary data, called uuencoding, Base64 and BinHex. Issues are further complicated by slight variations of the formats, the packaging, and some broken implementations.

Further problems arise with multi-part postings, where the encoding of a huge file has been split up into several individual messages to ensure proper transfer over gateways with limited message sizes. Very few software is able to properly sort and decode the parts. Even nowadays, many users are at a loss to decode these kinds of messages.

This is where the UUDeview Decoding Library steps in.


next up previous
Next: The Library Up: Introduction Previous: Introduction
Chris Hanson 2002-04-13