What's up with all those equals signs anyway?
by todsacerdoti on 2/3/2026, 9:37:40 AM
https://lars.ingebrigtsen.no/2026/02/02/whats-up-with-all-those-equals-signs-anyway/
Comments
by: ruhith
The real punchline is that this is a perfect example of "just enough knowledge to be dangerous." Whoever processed these emails knew enough to know emails aren't plain text, but not enough to know that quoted-printable decoding isn't something you hand-roll with find-and-replace. It's the same class of bug as manually parsing HTML with regex, it works right up until it doesn't, and then you get congressional evidence full of mystery equals signs.
2/3/2026, 11:56:40 AM
by: tiborsaas
> We see that that’s a quite a long line. Mail servers don’t like that<p>Why do mail server care about how long a line is? Why don't they just let the client reading the mail worry about wrapping the lines?
2/3/2026, 11:09:26 AM
by: heikkilevanto
I thought the article would be about the various meanings of operators like = == === .=. <== ==> <<== ==>> (==) => =~=
2/3/2026, 11:42:49 AM
by: jojomodding
<a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20260203094902/https://lars.ingebrigtsen.no/2026/02/02/whats-up-with-all-those-equals-signs-anyway/" rel="nofollow">https://web.archive.org/web/20260203094902/https://lars.inge...</a><p>Did the site get the HN kiss of death?
2/3/2026, 10:00:56 AM
by: beejiu
> So what’s happened here? Well, whoever collected these emails first converted from CRLF (i.e., “Windows” line ending coding) to “NL” (i.e., “Unix” line ending coding). This is pretty normal if you want to deal with email. But you then have one byte fewer:<p>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?<p>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.<p>Do we have anything to discount this?<p>(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.)
2/3/2026, 10:44:43 AM
by: quibono
CLRF vs LF strikes again. Partly at least.<p>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?
2/3/2026, 10:19:29 AM
by: lordnacho
I love how HN always floats up the answers to questions that were in my mind, without occupying my mind.<p>I, too, was reading about the new Epstein files, wondering what text artifact was causing things to look like that.
2/3/2026, 9:52:07 AM
by: noduerme
Great. Can't wait for equal signs to be the next (((whatever this is))). Maybe it's a secret code. j/k<p>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.
2/3/2026, 11:24:58 AM
by: seydor
TLDR "=\r\n" was converted to "=\n"
2/3/2026, 10:18:04 AM
by: brador
Could be worsened by inaccurate optical character recognition in some cases.<p>Back in those days optical scanners were still used.
2/3/2026, 11:14:19 AM
by: ccppurcell
Rock dots? You mean diacritics? Yeah someone invented them: the ancient Greeks, idiöt.
2/3/2026, 11:19:22 AM