It's because I
Stigers, Greg [And] <[log in to unmask]> wrote:


> For some reason, I have started seeing a number of messages where the
lines
> are terminating with equal signs, sometimes followed by "20", which I
can't
> say I care for. For instance, in the "e-commerce in hype-rdrive thread",
> Wyell Grunwald's message came to me with lines terminating with equal
signs,
> but when his posting was quoted in Al Karman's reply, it did not contain
> these equal signs. None of the other traffic I am receiving from anywhere
> else has shown this behavior so far. FWIW, I am using Outlook 98. Is
anyone
> else seeing this?

It's because I put a "hex" on Wyell Grunwald :-)

Seriously, what is happening is that a mail agent (probably Wyell's
Groupwise) is breaking up his long lines into lines of no more than 76
characters, as required by the Quoted-Printable Content-Transfer-Encoding
option of MIME (Section 6.7 of RFC2045).  It is inserting = signs before the
soft (i.e. non-significant) line breaks.  It is also required that any space
characters at the end of a line be encoded as =20.  Something (Exchange or
Outlook) is not interpreting this correctly.

Interestingly, my ISP automatically converts Quoted-Printable to 8-bit MIME,
so I don't see the equal signs even when I view the message source.

Perhaps there's an option on the mailing list software to convert to 8-bit
MIME for those message agents that support it.