On Sat, 11 Dec 2004 13:57:36 -0600, Patrick Leary <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

>VG8gdGhlIFNIQVJQLWxpc3QsDQogDQpJIHdhcyB3b25kZXJpbmcgaWYgYW55b25lIGtub3dzIGFi

This is an example of Base64 Encoding, commonly used for binary files such as
MS Word Documents, executable files, etc.  But also used for ...

>Does this have something to do with the character set, which I notice is
>"charset="utf-8" for this posting?

Yes, exactly.  Since UTF-8 may contain 7bit, 8bit, 16 bit or in some cases 32
bit 'characters' (e.g. Chinese, Japanese, Korean), the only safe encoding
mechanism is Base64.  Thus if the UTF-8 Charset is specified (as is the
default in recent MS mailers) then the mail will be B64 encoded and will not
be intelligible except when properly decoded.  The fix is unless you are in
Japan or similar and really need UTF-8, then reset to the standard ISO-8859-1
charset.