From Wikipedia:
The term Base64 refers to a specific MIME content transfer
encoding. It is also used as a generic term for any similar
encoding scheme that encodes binary data by treating it numerically
and translating it into a base 64 representation. The particular
choice of base is due to the history of character set encoding: one
can choose 64 characters that are both part of the subset common to
most encodings, and also printable. This combination leaves the
data unlikely to be modified in transit through systems, such as
email, which were traditionally not 8-bit clean.
Useful for emails that were not properly decoded by your email client.
