At 10:42 09/22/02, Marv Trott wrote:
>Why do some of the e-mail's have "=" or "=3D" at the end of each
>line and others just wrap around?


The equal signs that are sometimes visible at the ends of lines
because the messages were encoded using "quoted-printable".
You see them if your email program can't understand this encoding
or if the original message somehow got munged.
(If you set your email program to display full headers, you
should see the line "Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable"
in the headers of such messages.)

The quoted-printable encoding REQUIRES that encoded lines be no
more than 76 characters long. If longer lines are desired with
the quoted-printable encoding, "soft" line breaks must be
used. An equal sign as the last character on an encoded line
indicates such a "soft" line break in the encoded text. There
are of course times when we want an equal sign to mean "equals"
instead of a soft line break. In such cases the equal sign is
represented by "=3D".

Why quoted-printable?

Twenty years ago, when the email specs were being written, the
decision was made to encode email in such a way that only 128
different characters - letters, numbers, punctuation, and so
on - could be transmitted from one computer to another.

But characters used in foreign languages (special characters
with accent marks for example) are now important for large
numbers of email users. A way of encoding data called
"quoted-printable" was developed so that 256 different
characters can be represented. Unfortunately, the underlying
email transport is still limited to 128 different characters,
so an email using quoted-printable must first get converted to
the more limited character set, then be transmitted across the
Internet, and then (hopefully) get converted back at the other
end.

If the receiving software doesn't understand quoted-printable,
each extended character will show up as an equals-sign
followed by a two letter/digit Hex number. (The Hexadecimal
numbers are "0123456789ABCDEF".)

Example:

La premi=E8re journe=E9 de nos deux voyageurs fut assez
agr=E9able. Ils =E9=taient encourag=E9s par l'id=E9e de
se voir possesseurs de plus de tr=E9sors que l'Asie,
l'Europe, et l'Afrique n'en pouvaient rassembler.
Candide, transport=E9, =E9crivit le nom de Cun=E9gonde
sur les arbres.

Here "=E9" represents the French "e accent aigu" and "E8"
represents the "e accent grave." (There are no "="
because none of the lines is over 76 characters long
due to use of "hard" line feeds.)

Quoted-Printable is meant primarily for use with a non-English
language that requires extra characters or accent marks. It can
be confusing to some readers and if you use English only, you
should turn off quoted-printable for the sake of others.

I took some of the above "word for word" from
<http://www.freesoft.org/CIE/RFC/1521/6.htm> and
<http://www.webfoot.com/advice/email.format.html?Email>.

Regards,
Bill

      "Hold No Punches.." Rode brings you great shareware/freeware
        programs with his honest opinions in this weekly column.
                       http://freepctech.com/rode