this post was submitted on 04 Feb 2026
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What’s with the damn = ?
It has something to do with the way servers/protocol broke up emails into lines and stored the lines using = as demarcation. Whenever the emails were assembled, the = remained. We had a thread about it yesterday or the day before.
Do you have a link to that thread?
Because it often appears in place of 'I's and 'E's as if the emails were printed then re-digitalised with OCR(the top and bottom bars on I and E in certain fonts could trigger certain OCRs algos to read it as =)
It also appears to replace characters rather than being appended like you'd expect with a separation flag(chars in unused unicode spaces are also more likely to be used for that function than something commonly used in text like =), I could be wrong though so I'm interested in seeing the discussion
I do not. I just spent about 10 mins trying to find it. It's not in c/technology or c/chapotraphouse, that I can see. Searching "=" or any other relevant key words for posts or comments doesn't bring it up. IDK.
No worries, thanks for looking(I assume you also checked your browser history)
Maybe it was this I saw (thanks to astronot)
https://www.reddit.com/r/TrueAnon/comments/1quqk6q/this_is_where_all_those_equals_signs_in_the/
Really easy to confuse hexbear with r/trueanon since everyone just reposts from there all the time.
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I don't have a link to the thread over here, but this article explains it in depth
Yeah it looks like the digital rot version of copier burn.
In short, emails still use an old ASCII protocol from the 80s, and old servers used unix tools that read pipes line-by-line.
To avoid emails with long lines slowing down the servers, they break long lines before sending them.
Because it's ASCII, they use an ASCII control sequence to mark inserted line breaks.
That sequence is
=␍␊.There's some sequence of screwups in the email export that ended up with
last word =␍␊first wordgetting replaced withlast word =irst wordinstead oflast word first word.Thanks for the explanation, what's up with = appearing in the middle of words? does the protocol inserts breaks after a set number of chars, rather in the nearest whitespace to a set number of chars?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quoted-printable
It just breaks at 76 characters.
Terrible OCR I believe.
Why emails need OCR is a mystery however