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I think there is a second possible conclusion, which is that the transformation happened historically. Everyone assumes these emails are an exact dump from Gmail, but isn't it possible that Epstein was syncing emails from Gmail to a third party mail server?

Since the Stackoverflow post details the exact situation in 2011, I think we should be open to the idea that we're seeing data collected from a secondary mail server, not Gmail directly.

Do we have anything to discount this?

(If I'm not mistaken, I think you can also see the "=" issue simply by applying the Quoted-Printable encoding twice, not just by mishandling the line-endings, which also makes me think two mail servers. It also explains why the "=" symbol is retained.)

3 days agoby beejiu

Fun how the archive.today article near the top has this exact issue

https://pastes.io/correspond

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46843805

3 days agoby maartin0

https://web.archive.org/web/20260203094902/https://lars.inge...

Did the site get the HN kiss of death?

3 days agoby jojomodding

I love how HN always floats up the answers to questions that were in my mind, without occupying my mind.

I, too, was reading about the new Epstein files, wondering what text artifact was causing things to look like that.

3 days agoby lordnacho

(The title of the blog reminded me the late Bob Pease [1] who had the signature, "What's all this XXX stuff, anyhow?" [2] where XXX might be "noise gain", "capacitor leakage"…)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Pease

[2] https://www.qsl.net/n9zia/pease/index.html

3 days agoby JKCalhoun

CLRF vs LF strikes again. Partly at least.

I wonder why even have a max line length limit in the first place? I.e. is this for a technical reason or just display related?

3 days agoby quibono

Dear GNU's: rewrite the fetching core so it gets performant enough to not crawl under 10000 headers from either usenet or Email. No, even native compilation is fast enough.

3 days agoby anthk

I'd like a good .eml viewer that undoes the quoted printable transformation for the contained plain and html text. useful for mails downloaded from Outlook.

3 days agoby cachius

My main takeaway from this article, is that I want to know what happened to the modified pigs with non-cloven hoofs

3 days agoby voxelghost

What's funny is that the failure mode here is so quietly destructive

3 days agoby ErigmolCt

27b09b80f93cecf1-000000001b5e2c7f-0000000069825928

3 days agoby Hanzklatil369

Great. Can't wait for equal signs to be the next (((whatever this is))). Maybe it's a secret code. j/k

On a side note: There are actually products marketed as kosher bacon (it's usually beef or turkey). And secular Jews frequently make jokes like this about our kosher bros who aren't allowed to eat the real stuff for some dumb reason like it has too many toes.

3 days agoby noduerme

    cat title | sed 's/anyway/in email/'

would save a click for those already familiar with =20 etc.

3 days agoby lucb1e

"It’s a fascinating case of 'Abstraction Leak'.

We’ve become so accustomed to modern libraries handling encoding transparently that when raw data surfaces (like in these dumps), we often lack the 'Digital Archeology' skills to recognize basic Quoted-Printable.

These artifacts (=20, =3D) are effectively fossils of the transport layer. It’s a stark reminder that underneath our modern AI/React/JSON world, the internet is still largely held together by 7-bit ASCII constraints and protocols from the 1980s.

3 days agoby MarginalGainz

TLDR "=\r\n" was converted to "=\n"

3 days agoby seydor

People posting Excel formulae?

3 days agoby zabzonk

Could be worsened by inaccurate optical character recognition in some cases.

Back in those days optical scanners were still used.

3 days agoby brador

Rock dots? You mean diacritics? Yeah someone invented them: the ancient Greeks, idiöt.

3 days agoby ccppurcell