[NTLK] The deal with the equals signs

From: Sean Luke (sean_at_cs.gmu.edu)
Date: Wed Feb 13 2002 - 16:45:46 EST


On Wednesday, February 13, 2002, at 04:27 PM, newtontalk_at_newtontalk.net
wrote:

>> In the message received via newtontalk, we get the above characters.
>> What's the deal with the '3D=' and the '-=20' business?
>
> The first, I believe, is the 'equals sign' and the last is a hyphen
> followed
> by the end-of-line.

The internet mail protocol was originally designed for low-byte ASCII,
with
a requirement that lines be no longer than 80 characters or so. To
enhance this, a series of protocols were built on top of the mail
protocol. One of these is called MIME (Multimedia Internet Mail
Extensions, I think), developed about six years ago at U Washington and
now standard. MIME is what lets you send multiple attachments, change
fonts and colors and sizes, bold, italic, etc. MIME also lets you
specify odd characters.

To do this, MIME specifies that the text encoding is one of two forms:
quoted-printable or base64. quoted-printable is good for text that's
mostly ASCII with occasional odd characters. base64 is for really dense
binary stuff.

When you send an email message with accents in it, your email program
automatically encodes your message as quoted-printable. It specifies a
header indicating this. The various unusual characters get wrapped up
as the equal-sign encoding stuff. When a message reaches your email
program that's quoted printable, it gets properly decoded -- but ONLY if
this header is still there. Otherwise it's treated as plain text, so
you see a 3D= or a -=20.

No doubt Newtontalk is remailing the message without the header. In
general I suggest you don't send quoted-printable stuff anyway; it just
messes up the digests.

Sean

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