Instead of having individual links to other sites with more info on yEnc, here is a link to Google to search for current sites (as these things do change over time.)

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=yenc

As of this writing the current versions of most dedicated news clients have built-in support for yEnc, although some "stick-in-the-muds" insist on using older, non-yEnc-capable versions and therefore need to use a separate decoder for yEnc files.

There are pros and cons to most viewpoints and technologies, yEnc being no exception. As you can tell if you followed the Google link above, mostly there are pros, but there are some cons. It is not the purpose of this FAQ to go into the details of what is freely available elsewhere, just to give you enough information to answer the relevant question about yEnc: "Should I use it?"

In a word, yes! Why, and why so emphatic? Because an ever increasing number of posters are posting with it. Should you use a yEnc-capable news-client, or a non-yEnc-capable client, and a stand-alone decoder for downloading and decoding; or a yEnc encoder with a non-yenc capable posting client for uploading?

As usual there is no single avenue that will suit everyone, the choices are up to the individual. yEnc uses significantly fewer system resources, and despite some theoretical deficiencies, has performed admirably in the field. Many terabytes have been posted and downloaded with yEnc, with few-or-no problems related to the encoding scheme having been reported.

Empirically:

  A 29.1 MB test rar was compressed to that size using WinRAR 3.0, with a 4K dictionary size, as a solid archive.

Base file size 29.10 MB

The application used for the test post was Agent 1.91.  Similar numbers would apply to storage, and to downloading files encoded with UUE and yEnc.  Clearly yEnc is vastly superior.