For some reason or the other, people have been posting a lot of excerpts of old emails on Twitter over the past few days. The most important question everyone is asking themselves is: What’s up with all those similar signs?!
And this is something I’m somewhat of an expert at. I mean, written mail reader and stuff; Not because I’ve been to the Caribbean islands.
I’ve seen people confidently claim that it’s a code, or that it’s an artifact of scanning and then using OCR, but that’s not the case – it’s just that whoever converted these emails into a readable format was an idiot.
What do you call this? “Changed?! Surely emails are just text!!” Well, if you lived in the Stone Age (ie, the 80s) they mostly were, but then people invented things like “long lines” and “rock dots”, and computers had to “encode” mail before sending it.
The artwork we see here is from something called “quoted printable”, or as we called it when it was introduced: “quoted unreadable”.
To take the first row. Whoever wrote this typed the following into his mail reader:
we talked about designing a pig with different non- cloven hoofs in order to make kosher bacon
We see that this is quite a long line. Mail servers don’t like this, so mail software will break it into two lines, like this:
we talked about designing a pig with different non- = cloven hoofs in order to make kosher bacon
Look? There’s that equal sign! Yes, the equals sign is used to say “this should actually be a single line, but I broke it into two parts so the mail server won’t get angry at me”.
However, the formal definition is important here, so I have to get a little technical here: To say “this is a continuation line”, you put an equal sign, then a carriage return, and then a line feed.
Or,
=CRLF
Total three letters, i.e.:
... non- =CRLF cloven hoofs...
When displaying this, we remove these three characters, and are finished
with:
... non- cloven hoofs...
So what happened here? Well, whoever collected these emails in the first place changed them from CRLF (ie, “Windows” line end coding) to “NL” (ie, “Unix” line end coding). It’s perfectly normal if you want to deal with email. But then you have one byte less:
... non- =NL cloven hoofs...
If your algorithm for decoding this is silly, “find the equal sign at the end of the line, and then remove two letters, and then the equal sign at the end”, then you should end up with:
... non- loven hoofs...
That is, you lose the “c”. That’s almost what happened here, but not quite: Why is the equal sign still there?
This StackOverflow post from 14 years ago explains this phenomenon, thus:
Apparently the client notices that = is not followed by a proper CR LF sequence, so it assumes it is not a soft line break, but a character encoded in two hex digits, so it reads the next two bytes. It should note that the next two bytes are not valid hex digits, so its behavior is also wrong, but we have to accept that it doesn’t have a chance to display anything useful at that time. They chose a garbage in, garbage out approach.
That is, equal signs are used for something other than wrapping long lines, and that’s what we see later in the post:
=C2 please note
If the equals sign is not at the end of a line, it is used to encode “funny characters”, like you use with “rock dots”. =C2 is 194, which is the first character in the UTF-8 sequence, and the following character is probably =A0: =C2=A0 is the “non-breakable space” that people often use to indent text (and “Please note” is indented) and you see =A0 in many other places in these emails.
My guess is that whoever did this part just did a search-and-replace for =C2 and/or =A0 rather than using a proper decoder, but other explanations are certainly possible. any ideas?
Anyway, that’s what’s happening with those same signs: 1) “It’s technical”, and 2) “Whoever processed these mails is incompetent”. I don’t think 2) should be much of a surprise at this point, right?
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