On 2008-12-21, Paul Hovnanian P.E. wrote:

One can zip, uuencode and all that by hand. But you risk making the post
incompatible with other news readers. Or at least a pain in the *ss to
read. I've seen far too many uuencoded binaries done by hand that
present themselves as the body of the post consisting of a few hundred
lines of gibberish. The reader has to 'Save as' and then decode by hand.
Which is guaranteed to make the less patient give up.

splitting large uuencoded binaries by hand is while a "trivial" task, easy to
foul up.

Sections must be kept below 10k lines each.

The binary must be converted to ascii only. UUencode is the norm.

And what about the Content-type:, Content-Transfer-Encoding: mime
headers and required attributes? There's a lot more going on under the
hood of a binary post than just making a string of silly characters.

the only important header is the subject line, MIME does not support
file-splitting and so cannot be used to transmit large files.

(you could split the file first (eg: using rar) and then require the
recipient to reassemble them

10000 lines uuencoded (standard 62 char line length) is 450000 bytes (of
original data) but theres atleast three wrapper lines added, so if
pre-splitting do it to 449865 bytes or smaller