Editing Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (section)

===Binary data transfer===
Original SMTP supports only a single body of ASCII text, therefore any binary data needs to be encoded as text into that body of the message before transfer, and then decoded by the recipient. [[Binary-to-text encoding]]s, such as [[uuencode]] and [[BinHex]] were typically used.

The 8BITMIME command was developed to address this. It was standardized in 1994 as {{IETF RFC|1652|}}<ref>Which was obsoleted in 2011 by {{IETF RFC|6152|}} corresponding to the then new [[Internet standard|STD]] 71</ref> It facilitates the [[Transparency (telecommunication)|transparent]] exchange of [[e-mail]] messages containing octets outside the seven-bit [[ASCII]] character set by encoding them as [[MIME]] content parts, typically encoded with [[Base64]].