#!/usr/bin/perl use feature qw/say/; use warnings; use strict; use Encode; #assuming that my message is stored in some variable called $str my $str="Wir freuen uns, dass Sie den 1&1 E-Mail-Service f=C3=BCr Ihre=20"; print decode('MIME-Header', "Wir freuen uns, dass Sie den 1&1 E-Mail-Service f=C3=BCr Ihre=20"); print "\n"; print decode('MIME-Header', "=?iso-8859-1?Q?".$str);