SYNOPSIS

 my Mail::Message $msg = ...;
 my $decoded = $msg->decoded;
 my $encoded = $msg->encode(transfer => 'base64');

See SYNOPSIS in Mail::Message::TransferEnc

DESCRIPTION

Encode or decode message bodies with base64. The e-mail protocol and user agents can not handle binary data. Therefore, binary data -but even sometimes non-binary data- is encoded into ASCII, this is transportable.

Base64 re-groups the bits of bytes, and maps them on characters. The data contains bytes of 8 bits (an octet). These are repacked into groups of 6 bits, pointing in an array of characters containing [A-Za-z0-9+/]. This way, three data bytes become 4 base64 bytes. The encoded data will be trailed by '=' characters to align on four bytes.

See DESCRIPTION in Mail::Message::TransferEnc