There are sometimes cases when such encoding is necessary, such as to not interfere with the message framing, and there are many such cases; it happens in many

There are sometimes cases when such encoding is necessary, such as to not interfere with the message framing, and there are many such cases; it happens in many text-based protocols (which is good in order to be able to work it without specialized software; for example, NNTP). Or if you are going to type in the data by hand, maybe, such as from a print out.