The American Standard Code for Information Interchange, or ASCII for short, is a computer code that uses 128 different encoding combinations of a group of seven bits, or pieces of information, to represent a number of alphanumeric features. These include the characters A to Z (both upper and lower case), special characters, such as < and ?, the numbers 0 to 9, and special control codes for control of the device. ASCII characters can utilize parity.

ASCII allows the creation of text files. Unlike the characters in word processing documents, however, ASCII does not allow special formatting, such as the use of different fonts, bold, underlined or italic text. All the characters used in email messages were originally ASCII characters--formatting bold and italic characters involve hypertext markup language (HTML). Additionally, because email characters are ASCII, graphics files, and documents with non-ASCII...