Mail Basic Interchange

In general, electronic mail (email) strategy has been one of turning email into a canonical, labeled format as opposed to optimizing a message given knowledge of the receiver's locale. This means that in the email world, you should always assume that the receiver may be in a different locale. In the desktop world, the default email transport is Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP), which only supports 7-bit transmission channels.

With this understanding, the email strategy for the desktop is as follows:

The sending agents, by default (unless instructed otherwise by the user), converts a body part into a standard format for the sending transmission channel and labels the body part with the character encoding used.
The receiving agent looks at the body part to see if it can support the character encoding; if it can, it converts it into the local character set.

In addition, because the MIME format is used for messages, any 8-bit to 7-bit transformations are done using the built-in MIME transport encodings (base64 or quoted-printable). See the Request for Comments (RFC) 1521 MIME standard specification.

Mail Basic Interchange

Technical documentation

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