Question

Why does the opencart mail class encode the senders name?

$header .= 'From: ' . '=?UTF-8?B?' . base64_encode($this->sender) . '?=' . '<' . $this->from . '>' . $this->newline;

Is this an old technique? I haven’t seen it like this before.

Are there any disadvantages to encoding it?

Answer 1

Quoted from Wikipedia:

This is to ensure that the data remain intact without modification
during transport. Base64 is commonly used in a number of applications
including email via MIME.
Base64

The MIME standard introduced character set specifiers and two content
transfer encodings to enable transmission of non-ASCII data: quoted
printable for mostly 7 bit content with a few characters outside that
range and base64 for arbitrary binary data.
Content Encoding