Provided certain rules are followed during encoding, UTF-7 can be sent in e-mail without using an underlying MIME transfer encoding, but still must be explicitly identified as the text character set. In addition, if used within e-mail headers such as "Subject:", UTF-7 must be contained in MIME encoded words identifying the character set. Since encoded words force use of either quoted-printable or base64, UTF-7 was designed to avoid using the = sign as an escape character to avoid double escaping when it is combined with quoted-printable (or its variant, the RFC 2047/1522 ?Q?-encoding of headers).