That horse was already bothered and I had already used the binary FH call and got the same results. 

But I think I have pinpointed the exact location of the problem: it's in the encode_base64 code itself - on the last few lines:

sub encode_base64 ($) {
 my $res = "";
 my $eol = "\n";
 pos($_[0]) = 0; 
 while ($_[0] =~ /(.{1,45})/gs) {
   $res .= substr(pack("u", $1), 1);
   chop($res);
 }
 $res =~ tr|` -_|AA-Za-z0-9+/|;          
#!!! Here's where the different characters are created!!!!
# my $padding = (3 - length($_[0]) % 3) % 3;
# $res =~ s/.{$padding}$/"=" x $padding/e if $padding;
# if (length $eol) {
#   $res =~ s/(.{1,76})/$1$eol/g;
# }

 $res;
}

I have borrowed this code and don't know what it's trying to do - is it a standard? Since I have no MIME access on my host, and I'm using UNIX - is it possible another encoding function exists, something like uu?encode? Thanks again. Peter.