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What's up with all those equals signs anyway?

lars.ingebrigtsen.no

21–30 of 200 posts

Re: What's up with all those equals signs anyway?

#21
post #12

> So what’s happened here? Well, whoever collected these emails first converted from CRLF (i.e., “Windows” line ending coding) to “NL” (i.e., “Unix” line ending coding). This is pretty normal if you want to deal with email. But you then have one byte fewer: I think there is a second possible conclusion, which is that the transformation happened historically. Everyone assumes these emails are an exact dump from Gmail,…

This seems like the most likely reason to me!

Re: What's up with all those equals signs anyway?

#22
post #14
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't seen them other than in the submission - but if the length matches up it may be that they were processed from raw email, the RFC defines a length to wrap at. Edit: yes I think that's most likely what it is (and it's SHOULD 78ch; MUST 998ch) - I was forgetting that it also specifies the CRLF usage, it's not (necessarily) related to Windows at all here as described in TFA. Here it is in my 'notmuch-more' emai…

> it's not (necessarily) related to Windows at all here as described in TFA. The article doesn't claim that it's Windows related. The article is very clear in explaining that the spec requires =CRLF (3 characters), then mentions (in passing) that CRLF is the typical line ending on Windows, then speculates that someone replaced the two characters CRLF with a one character new line, as on Unix or other OSs.

Ok yeah I may have misinterpreted that bit in the article. It would be a totally reasonable assumption if you didn't happen to know that about email though, it wasn't a judgement regardless.

Re: What's up with all those equals signs anyway?

#25

> We see that that’s a quite a long line. Mail servers don’t like that Why do mail server care about how long a line is? Why don't they just let the client reading the mail worry about wrapping the lines?

The simplest reason: Mail servers have long had features which will send the mail client a substring of the text content without transferring the entire thing. Like the GMail inbox view, before you open any one message.

I suspect this is relevant because Quoted Printable was only a useful encoding for MIME types like text and HTML (the human readable email body), not binary (eg. Attachments, images, videos). Mail servers (if they want) can effectively treat the binary types as an opaque blob, while the text types can be read for more efficient transfer of message listings to the client.

Re: What's up with all those equals signs anyway?

#28
Great. Can't wait for equal signs to be the next (((whatever this is))). Maybe it's a secret code. j/k

On a side note: There are actually products marketed as kosher bacon (it's usually beef or turkey). And secular Jews frequently make jokes like this about our kosher bros who aren't allowed to eat the real stuff for some dumb reason like it has too many toes.

Re: What's up with all those equals signs anyway?

#29

> We see that that’s a quite a long line. Mail servers don’t like that Why do mail server care about how long a line is? Why don't they just let the client reading the mail worry about wrapping the lines?

As far as I can remember, most mail servers were fairly sane about that sort of thing, even back in the 90’s when this stuff was introduced. However, there were always these more or less motivated fears about some server somewhere running on some ancient IBM hardware using EBCDIC encoding and truncating everything to 72 characters because its model of the world was based on punched cards. So standards were written to handle all those bizarre systems. And I am sure that there is someone on HN who actually used one of those servers...
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