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