The F=9 delivery agent flag causes the MIME message body of a delivered message to be converted back from either quoted-printable or base64 into its original 8-bit form. The F=9 delivery agent flag is effective only if sendmail was compiled with MIME7TO8 defined (MIME7TO8).

Conversion works only on single-part MIME messages. If the Content-Type: header is other than text/plain, no conversion is done. Otherwise, the Content-Transfer-Encoding: header is examined. If the Content-Transfer-Encoding: header type is base64, conversion is done from base64 to 8-bit. Otherwise, if the Content-Transfer-Encoding: header type is quoted-printable, conversion is done from quoted-printable to 8-bit. If the Content-Transfer-Encoding: header type is neither, no conversion is done.