What's up with all those equals signs anyway?

Recently, a plethora of old emails, notably those released from the Epstein files, have circulated on social media, baffling observers with peculiar equals signs seemingly embedded in the text. This article dissects the mystery, revealing that these aren't secret codes or scanning errors, but rather remnants of a specific email encoding standard botched by inadequate conversion.

• Quoted-Printable Explained: The culprit is "Quoted-Printable" encoding, an older standard designed to handle long lines and special characters in email before modern encodings were widespread.
• Soft Line Breaks: An equals sign followed by a carriage return and line feed (=CRLF) signifies a 'soft' line break, intended to be invisible to the user. This allowed email clients to break long lines for transmission without altering the content.
• Character Encoding: Equals signs are also used to encode non-ASCII characters (e.g., =C2=A0 for a non-breaking space), particularly common for formatting.
• Conversion Faux Pas: The visible equals signs are primarily due to incompetent conversion. When emails were processed, especially moving from CRLF (Windows) to LF (Unix) line endings, the decoding algorithm failed to correctly strip the =CRLF sequence, leaving the = visible. Similarly, explicit search-and-replace for encoded characters instead of proper decoding preserved other equals signs.

In essence, the author concludes that these visual glitches are a testament to technical specifics combined with the all-too-common issue of poorly executed data processing.