Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

What's up with all those equals signs anyway?

lars.ingebrigtsen.no

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 200 posts

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

#51

Post by jibal »

tiborsaas wrote: post #34
Pinus wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Thanks, I really expected a tale from the 70's, but did not see punch cards coming :)

The influence of 80 column punch cards remains pervasive.

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

#52

Post by ropp »

xg15 wrote: post #49

I'm just wondering why this problem shows up now . Why do lots of people suddenly post their old emails with a defective QP decoder? > For some reason or other, people have been posting a lot of excerpts from old emails on Twitter over the last few days. On the risk of having missed the latest meme or social media drama, but does anyone know what this "some reason or other" is? Edit: Question answered.

the DOJ published another bunch of Epstein emails

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

#53

Post by SCdF »

xg15 wrote: post #49

I'm just wondering why this problem shows up now . Why do lots of people suddenly post their old emails with a defective QP decoder? > For some reason or other, people have been posting a lot of excerpts from old emails on Twitter over the last few days. On the risk of having missed the latest meme or social media drama, but does anyone know what this "some reason or other" is? Edit: Question answered.

Presumably the Epstein files, but I'm not on twitter so not sure

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

#54

Post by [deleted] »

xg15 wrote: post #49

I'm just wondering why this problem shows up now . Why do lots of people suddenly post their old emails with a defective QP decoder? > For some reason or other, people have been posting a lot of excerpts from old emails on Twitter over the last few days. On the risk of having missed the latest meme or social media drama, but does anyone know what this "some reason or other" is? Edit: Question answered.

[deleted]

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

#55

Post by liveoneggs »

tiborsaas wrote: post #20

> 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?

This is how email work(ed) over smtp. When each command was sent it would get a '200'-class message (success) or 400/500-class message (failure). Sound familiar?

telnet smtp.mailserver.com 25

HELO

MAIL FROM: me@foo.com

RCPT TO: you@bar.com

DATA

blah blah blah

how's it going?

talk to you later!

.

QUIT

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

#56

Post by xg15 »

SCdF wrote: post #53
xg15 wrote: post #49

I'm just wondering why this problem shows up now . Why do lots of people suddenly post their old emails with a defective QP decoder? > For some reason or other, people have been posting a lot of excerpts from old emails on Twitter over the last few days. On the risk of having missed the latest meme or social media drama, but does anyone know what this "some reason or other" is? Edit: Question answered.

Presumably the Epstein files, but I'm not on twitter so not sure

Ooh, that reason. Sorry for having been dense. Thanks!

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

#58

Post by jychang »

xg15 wrote: post #49

I'm just wondering why this problem shows up now . Why do lots of people suddenly post their old emails with a defective QP decoder? > For some reason or other, people have been posting a lot of excerpts from old emails on Twitter over the last few days. On the risk of having missed the latest meme or social media drama, but does anyone know what this "some reason or other" is? Edit: Question answered.

[flagged]

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

#59

Post by ccppurcell »

RHSeeger wrote: post #27
ccppurcell wrote: post #26

Rock dots? You mean diacritics? Yeah someone invented them: the ancient Greeks, idiöt.

It's not the character, its the way / context in which it's used https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metal_umlaut

I know what he was referring to. But the use case is obviously languages other than English, not the Motörhead fan club newsletter.

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

#60

Post by lvncelot »

ruhith wrote: post #38

[dead]

> It's the same class of bug as manually parsing HTML with regex, it works right up until it doesn't

I'm sure you already know this one, but for anyone else reading this I can share my favourite StackOverflow answer of all time: https://stackoverflow.com/a/1732454

Post reply on HN