Network Working Group D. Spinellis Request for Comments: 1947 SENA S.A. Category: Informational May 1996 Greek Character Encoding for Electronic Mail Messages Status of This Memo This memo provides information for the Internet community. This memo does not specify an Internet standard of any kind. Distribution of this memo is unlimited. Overview and Rational This document describes a standard encoding for electronic mail [RFC 822] containing Greek text and provides implementation guide- lines. The standard is based on MIME [RFC 1521] and the ISO 8859-7 character encoding. Although the implementation of this standard is straightforward several non-standard but "functional" - though unlikely to inter-operate - alternatives are in common use. For this reason we highlight common implementation and mail user agent setup errors. Description In order to transfer Greek text via electronic mail the text is first translated into the ISO 8859-7 character set, and then encoded using either the Base64 (preferable for text that is mainly Greek) or the Quoted-Printable (justifiable in cases where some Greek words appear inside predominately Latin text) method, as defined in MIME. The following table provides most common Greek encodings (see also [RFC 1345]): 0646 37 M7 51 MC 23 69 LG L1 G7 GO GC 28 97 Description ---- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- ----------- 0386 ea a2 86 cd 71 86 b6 Capital alpha with acute 0388 eb b8 8d ce 72 8d b8 Capital epsilon with acute 0389 ec b9 8f d7 73 8f b9 Capital eta with acute 038a ed ba 90 d8 75 90 ba Capital iota with acute 038c ee bc 92 d9 76 92 bc Capital omicron with acute 038e ef be 95 da 77 95 be Capital upsilon with acute 038f f0 bf 98 df 78 98 bf Capital omega with acute 0390 c0 a1 fd a1 c0 Small iota with acute and Spinellis Informational