Of course, the characters you see in the email attachment are not random. They are uuencoded. Uuencoding is a method of representing arbitrary binary data (such as programs, word processor documents, or images) in plain US-ASCII text.
Why Uuencode?
Why would anybody need a way for doing that? Email was designed for textual messages using only English characters and cannot safely transport text in other languages let alone binary files such as images or programs. When you insert the latter in an email you never know what will come out at the recipient's end, or if anything will come out at all.
This is why a way to convert binary data to ASCII text (and vice versa) was needed. Uuencoding is one way, and in a sense a predecessor to MIME and its predominant Base64 encoding.
What Uuencoding Does
Like Base64 encoding, uuencoding takes three bytes of binary data and converts them to four bytes of ASCII text (which equals four characters). Each byte consists of eight bits.
For the conversion, uuencoding starts by concatenating the 24 bits (3 times 8) that make up the three binary data bytes and splitting them into four chunks of six bits each.
To get four complete bytes (which need eight bits but we only have six), '0' characters need to be placed in front of these chunks. We do not want to change the value of the chunks, 007 has the same value has 7.
So far, we have turned three bytes into four bytes by adding superfluous data and wasting space. This is necessary to ensure each byte can be represented in ASCII characters. Another step is necessary before we can begin that conversion, however.
Nonchalantly, we add 32 (100000 in binary notation) to each of the four bytes. This makes sure that the output data is indeed a printable character, which begin with ASCII 32, the white space. To get the character, we look up the byte value in the ASCII codeset (65, for example, corresponds to 'A').
Now we have a way to transform binary data to ASCII text. To make it ready for inclusion in email messages, one more hurdle is waiting for us to be taken. While there is no limit to the size of an email message, email servers can and do limit the length of a single line in an email. We need to insert line breaks into our output data.
This is done after at most 45 characters. Since the last line will not always be filled with 45 characters and to introduce a certain amount of data security, each line begins with a character indicating the length of the line. To get this character, we apply the procedure that already got us ASCII characters for our binary bits to the line length: we add 32 and look up the character in the ASCII table. If the line is 45 bytes long, for example, we look up 77, which is 'M'. This is why you will find a capital M at the beginning of most lines in a uuencoded file.
Encoding Example
Let us assume we have three bytes of input: 155, 162 and 233. The corresponding bit stream is 100110111010001011101001, which in turn corresponds to the 6-bit values 100110, 111010, 001011 and 101001.
Now we turn these six-bit chunks into full bytes (00100110 = 38, 00111010 = 58, 00001011 = 11 and 00101001 = 41) and add 32 to get 70 = 01000110, 90 = 01011010, 43 = 00101011 and 73 = 01001001.
Eventually, we look up these numbers in the ASCII table: 70 = F, 90 = Z, 43 = + and 73 = I. Our input stream converts to the printable characters FZ+I.
FZ+I is 4 bytes long, plus 32 makes 36, which translates to '$'. So the full line of uuencoded data is $FZ+I.
Header and Footer
Only the "begin" and "end" are still missing.
The header line of a uuencoded file consists of the word "begin", the Unix file permission value (something like "664") and the file name.
A header line could look like this, for example: "begin 664 test.bin".
The footer is simply "end". A complete example, thus, would be:
begin 664 test.bin
$FZ+I
end
