Re: META: Weird increase of equality signs in emails

On 2/28/06, Amanda Babcock Furrow <ababcock@...> wrote:
> On Tue, Feb 28, 2006 at 03:52:27PM +0100, Carsten Becker wrote:
>
> > I'm a bit annoyed that at the moment, there is hardly any
> > message these days from the list which does not have at
> > least one letter of a word in any paragraph that is not
> > randomly replaced by a equality sign for whatever reason.
>
> The equal signs are part of MIME-encoding.
If so, then you would expect to see them in two places.

1. Introducing the replacement of a non-ASCII byte with its
hexadecimal value. For instance, in a Latin-1 message, the character
U+00A1 INVERTED EXCLAMATION POINT would be replaced by =A1.  In a
UTF-8 message, that same character would be replaced by =C2=A1.

2. Indicating a soft line break.  = at the end of a line indicates
that the following newline is not part of the original text but has
been introduced as part of the encoding to keep lines under the
mandated limit (which is somewhere around 80 characters per line).

I would suspect #2 in your case: if raw email source were copied and
pasted into a message, then you might see lots of random equal signs
at weird places that used to be the end of a line but aren't anymore.
But I don't know why that would be happening automatically in gmail,
which I and others are using with no such issue.

> I also prefer non-MIME-encoded mail,
> since my email reading solution is broken in a different way from yours -
> I *cannot* get Mutt to stop substituting "?" for latin-1 letters that
> I could read just fine if it would only display them!
Ah!  I am familiar with this problem and may be able to help you
offlist.  You might need willingness to recompile mutt from source
yourself.  But the first thing to check is that you have your locale
environment variables set properly for your terminal.

--
Mark J. Reed <markjreed@...>