The presence of certain characters in the message, or the simple fear of the potential presence of such characters in the message, causes mail programs to turn on one of the two available mail encoding options, quoted-printable and base64. The exact conditions that trigger this and the choice of one method over the other depend entirely on which mail program you are using. From your description, the Blackberry appears to always pick base64, but perhaps it can be configured to use quoted-printable, which does not look like garbage to recipients of the plain-text digest. As for what triggers encoding on the Blackberry, who knows? Perhaps it saw an 8-bit character somewhere in the original message, or in the address book, and it decided to enable encoding just to be on the safe side. Some mail clients appear to always use base64 encoding, without reason. The only solution is to use MIME digests. Eric