When you leave the ascii domain, what you see is only vaguely related to what you send, and what you send is only vaguely related to what the recipient sees. There are many possible levels of encoding and many possibilities for the display of the decoded information. For example, your recent subject line displays approximately like this on my email system, which I wrote to deliberately limit subject lines to plain ascii: Subject: [math-fun] iso-8859-7?b?cHJvZHVjdF97MDxrPG4sIChrLG4pPTF9IEdh?= iso-8859-7?b?bW1hKHoray9uKSA/IFtXYXM6IHByb2R1Y3RfeyhrLG4pPTF9?= iso-8859-7?b?IMMoeitrL24pID9d?= (some characters were removed to inhibit multibyte character interpretation). Also, the spam evaluation done by my ISP's software is mildly prone to calling you a miscreant: * 1.5 TR_Symld_Words too many words that have symbols inside * 0.1 XMSubLong Long Subject * 0.0 HTML_MESSAGE BODY: HTML included in message * 0.8 BAYES_50 BODY: Bayes spam probability is 40 to 60% * [score: 0.5000] * 0.0 T_TooManySym_04 7+ unique symbols in subject * 0.0 T_TooManySym_01 4+ unique symbols in subject * 0.0 T_TooManySym_05 8+ unique symbols in subject * 0.0 T_TooManySym_03 6+ unique symbols in subject * 0.0 T_TooManySym_02 5+ unique symbols in subject Hilarie