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copied!<p>To recap, I was creating a URL that used a base-64 encoded parameter which was itself a Triple DES encrypted string. So the URL looked like http://[Domain_Name]/SDN1S2JkeXpyVW890 The link referenced a controller action on an MVC web site.</p> <p>The URL was then inserted into an HTML formatted email. Looking at the error log, we saw that around 5% of the public users that responded to the link were throwing an "invalid base-64 string error". Most, but not all, of these errors were related to the IE6 user agent.</p> <p>After trying many possible solutions based around character and URL encoding, it was discovered that somewhere in the client's process the url was being converted to lower-case - this, of course, broke the base-64 encoding (as it is uses both upper and lower case encoding characters).</p> <p>Whether the case corruption was caused by the client's browser, email client or perhaps local anti-virus software, I have not been able to determine.</p> <p><strong>The Solution</strong> Do not use any of the standard base-64 encoding methods, instead use a base-32 or zBase-32 encoding instead - both of which are case-insensitive.</p> <p>See the following links for more details</p> <p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base32" rel="nofollow">Base-32 - Wikipedia</a></p> <p><a href="http://mytenpennies.wikidot.com/blog%3abase-32-encoder" rel="nofollow">MyTenPennies Base-32 .NET Implementation</a></p> <p>The moral of the story is, Base-64 URL encoding can be unreliable in some public environments. Base-32, whilst slightly more verbose, is a better choice.</p> <p>Hope this helps.</p>

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