[geeks] stupid email clients

[Mouse]

> Rats... today I converted my dovecot server over to maildir so I was
> actually looking at message text.

> I didn't realize that at some point my messages had reverged to that
> awful stuff with '=' at the end of the lines.

It's formally called quoted-printable, but it gets called
quoted-unprintable for a reason. :)

They may or may not have, depending.

One of the proprties of MIME (whether it's a bug or feature is a
question I see little benefit to going into here) is that content can
be mechanically converted between representations.  Your mail, as it
arrived in my mailbox, was marked

Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

and wasn't all quoted-unprintable, but I don't know how many
transformations it went through on the way.  One of the commoner
autoconversting MTAs (sendmail, I think) adds X-MIME-Autoconverted:
headers when it converts context; I didn't see any, but there are
plenty of pieces of software which could have autoconverted without
adding such a marker.

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