7 Bit Encoding

7 bit encoding is a reference to the ASCII character set, which is a set of 128 English alphabet characters and is used to store letters in binary. The set includes all the English lowercase letters, uppercase letters, and numbers from 0 to 9.

The reason for the characters to be encoded to 7-bits, is because early computers handled data in bytes, or 8 bits. The extra bit was originally reserved for error checking.

In this encoding we get 7 digit representations in 0s and 1s for each of the English letters we are trying to transmit.

SendGrid requires 7 bit encoding in our SMTPAPI categories header.

For more information, visit Wikipedia for the entire history of ASCII.

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