RFC 1947 (rfc1947) - Page 1 of 7
Greek Character Encoding for Electronic Mail Messages
Alternative Format: Original Text Document
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
