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What's up with all those equals signs anyway?

lars.ingebrigtsen.no

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

#71

Post by MarginalGainz »

"It’s a fascinating case of 'Abstraction Leak'.

We’ve become so accustomed to modern libraries handling encoding transparently that when raw data surfaces (like in these dumps), we often lack the 'Digital Archeology' skills to recognize basic Quoted-Printable.

These artifacts (=20, =3D) are effectively fossils of the transport layer. It’s a stark reminder that underneath our modern AI/React/JSON world, the internet is still largely held together by 7-bit ASCII constraints and protocols from the 1980s.

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

#72

Post by kapep »

josefx wrote: post #61
lvncelot wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

I prefer the question about CPU pipelines that gets explained using a railroad switch as example. That one does a decent job of answering the question instead of going of on a, how to best put it, mentally deranged one page rant about regexes with the lazy throw away line at the end being the only thing that makes it qualify as an answer at all.

The regex answer is from the very old days of Stackoverflow, before fun was banned. I agree it barely qualifies as answer, but considering that the question has over 4 million page views (which almost puts it in the top 100 most viewed questions all-time), it has reached a lot people. The answer probably had much more influence than any serious answer on that topic. So I'd say the author did a good job.

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

#73

Post by fluoridation »

direwolf20 wrote: post #41
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?

SMTP is a line–based protocol, including the part that transfers the message body The server needs to parse the message headers, so it can't be an opaque blob. If the client uses IMAP, the server needs to fully parse the message. The only alternative is POP3, where the client downloads all messages as blobs and you can only read your email from one location, which made sense in the year 2000 but not now when everyone…

Hey, POP3 still makes sense. Having a local copy of your emails is useful.

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

#74

Post by bayesnet »

lvncelot wrote: post #60
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

I know this is grumpy but this I’ve never liked this answer. It is a perfect encapsulation of the elitism in the SO community—if you’re new, your questions are closed and your answers are edited and downvoted. Meanwhile this is tolerated only because it’s posted by a member with high rep and username recognition.

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

#76

Post by fluoridation »

sumtechguy wrote: post #62
josefx wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

RFC822 explicitly says it is for readability on systems with simple display software. Given that the protocol is from 1982 and systems back then had between 4 and 16kb RAM in total it might have made sense to give the lower end thin client systems of the day something preprocessed.

Also it is an easy way to stop a denial of service attack. If you let an infinite amount in that field. I can remotely overflow your system memory. The mail system can just error out and hang up on the person trying the attack instead of crashing out.

Surely you don't need the message to be broken up into lines just for that. Just read until a threshold is reached and then close the connection.

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

#77

Post by direwolf20 »

fluoridation wrote: post #73
direwolf20 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SMTP is a line–based protocol, including the part that transfers the message body The server needs to parse the message headers, so it can't be an opaque blob. If the client uses IMAP, the server needs to fully parse the message. The only alternative is POP3, where the client downloads all messages as blobs and you can only read your email from one location, which made sense in the year 2000 but not now when everyone…

Hey, POP3 still makes sense. Having a local copy of your emails is useful.

If you want it to be the only copy and not sync with anything

POP3 is line–based too, anyway. Maybe you can rsync your maildir?

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

#78

Post by MrGilbert »

josefx wrote: post #61
lvncelot wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

I prefer the question about CPU pipelines that gets explained using a railroad switch as example. That one does a decent job of answering the question instead of going of on a, how to best put it, mentally deranged one page rant about regexes with the lazy throw away line at the end being the only thing that makes it qualify as an answer at all.

For anyone wondering about the railroad switch post: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/11227809/why-is-processi...

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

#79

Post by keybored »

brk wrote: post #66
quibono wrote: post #6

CLRF vs LF strikes again. Partly at least. I wonder why even have a max line length limit in the first place? I.e. is this for a technical reason or just display related?

Wait, now we have to deal with Carriage Line Return Feeds too? I wonder if the person who had the idea of virtualizing the typewriter carriage knew how much trouble they would cause over time.

Yeah, and using two bytes for a single line termination (or separation or whatever)? Why make things more complicated and take more space at the same time?

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

#80

Post by grimgrin »

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

you presume cor=rect

https://www.jmail.world/thread/EFTA02512824?view=person

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