In <[log in to unmask]> [log in to unmask] writes:

> 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?

What you're seeing are the mangled remains of a message part that was
encoded using MIME's quoted-printable encoding. QP specifies exactly where
hard end-of-lines are with an =<hex code> sequence. It also will encode
some imbedded special characters (including any "="s within the text of the
message. QP allows transmission of some special characters and encoded fonts
over traditional 7-bit email transfer methods. Now that I've bored you to
death with that...

Normally your message agent (client) doesn't show you those characters as
it interprets them before displaying them -- at least MIME compatible
clients do. Oftentimes, adding a special character or a special font to
a message in one of the gui clients causes the client to use QP when
sending the message, in an effort to preserve your special character(s) -
normal SMTP "text" email doesn't support that stuff.

The stuff you're seeing are likely the result of one of two things; someone
with a non-MIME compatible (aka "steam powered" :-) ) email client replied
to a message sent in QP format, leaving the imbedded =xx codes, and
removing the critical MIME email headers identifying the message part as
being quoted-printable. Another annoying factor some of you might see is a
bug in all version of M$ Lookout that I know of which automatically tries to
interpret text/plain email messages as if they were quoted-printable
anyway... Where if you get such a message with something interesting like
  5+5=10 in it, M$ users will likely see "5+5" and a newline. (Some M$
users reading this message may not see that the above line really reads
"5 plus 5 equal-sign 10" and may not understand what I'm talking about. :-) )

That all may not help much, but hope it explains what's happening. It's not
the fault of the listserv (at least in most cases).

   -Chris eBartram