A new Request for Comments is now available in online RFC libraries.


        RFC 1642:

        Title:      UTF-7 - A Mail-Safe Transformation Format of
                    Unicode 
        Author:     D. Goldsmith & M. Davis
        Mailbox:    david_goldsmith@taligent.com,
                    mark_davis@taligent.com
        Pages:      14
        Characters: 27,770
        Updates/Obsoletes:  none


The Unicode Standard, version 1.1, and ISO/IEC 10646-1:1993(E) jointly
define a 16 bit character set (hereafter referred to as Unicode) which
encompasses most of the world's writing systems.  However, Internet
mail (STD 11, RFC 822) currently supports only 7-bit US ASCII as a
character set. MIME (RFC 1521 and RFC 1522) extends Internet mail to
support different media types and character sets, and thus could
support Unicode in mail messages.  MIME neither defines Unicode as a
permitted character set nor specifies how it would be encoded,
although it does provide for the registration of additional character
sets over time.  This document describes a new transformation format
of Unicode that contains only 7-bit ASCII characters and is intended
to be readable by humans in the limiting case that the document
consists of characters from the US-ASCII repertoire.  It also
specifies how this transformation format is used in the context of RFC
1521, RFC 1522, and the document "Using Unicode with MIME" (RFC 1641).

This memo defines an Experimental Protocol for the Internet community.
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Joyce K. Reynolds
USC/Information Sciences Institute