For some reason or other, people have been posting a lot of excerpts from old emails on Twitter over the last few days. The most vital question everybody’s asking themselves is: What’s up with all those equals signs?!
And that’s something I’m somewhat of an expert on. I mean, having written mail readers and stuff; not because I’ve been to Caribbean islands.
I’ve seen people confidently claim that it’s a code, or that it’s an artefact of scanning and then using OCR, but it’s neither — it’s just that whoever converted these emails to a readable format were morons.
What’s that you say? “Converted?! Surely emails are just text!!” Well, if you lived in the stone age (i.e., the 80s), they mostly were, but then people invented things like “long lines” and “rock döts”, and computers had to “encode” the mail before sending.
The artefact we see here is from something called “quoted printable”, or as we used to call it when it was introduced: “Quoted unreadable”.
To take the first line. Whoever wrote this, typed in the following in their mail reader:
we talked about designing a pig with different non- cloven hoofs in order to make kosher bacon
We see that that’s quite a long line. Mail servers don’t like that, so mail software will break it into two lines, like so:
we talked about designing a pig with different non- = cloven hoofs in order to make kosher bacon
See? There’s that equals sign! Yes, the equals sign is used to say “this should really be one single line, but I’ve broken it in two so that the mail server doesn’t get mad at me”.
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