Did the site get the HN kiss of death?
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?
It's just sp hacky i cant belive it's a real life's solution
But I agree with sibling comment: it makes more sense when its called "encoding" instead of "inserting chars into original stream"
Consider converting the original text (maintaining the author’s original line wrapping and indentation) to base64. Has anything been “inserted” into the text? I would suggest not. It has been encoded.
Now consider an encoding that leaves most of the text readable, translates some things based on a line length limit, and some other things based on transport limitations (e.g. passing through 7-bit systems.) As long as one follows the correct decoding rules, the original will remain intact - nothing “inserted.” The problem is someone just knowledgeable enough to be aware that email is human readable but not aware of the proper decoding has attempted to “clean up” the email for sharing.
Edit: yes I think that's most likely what it is (and it's SHOULD 78ch; MUST 998ch) - I was forgetting that it also specifies the CRLF usage, it's not (necessarily) related to Windows at all here as described in TFA.
Here it is in my 'notmuch-more' email lib: https://github.com/OJFord/amail/blob/8904c91de6dfb5cba2b279f...
The article doesn't claim that it's Windows related. The article is very clear in explaining that the spec requires =CRLF (3 characters), then mentions (in passing) that CRLF is the typical line ending on Windows, then speculates that someone replaced the two characters CRLF with a one character new line, as on Unix or other OSs.
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.)
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?
lordnacho•1h ago
I, too, was reading about the new Epstein files, wondering what text artifact was causing things to look like that.
AlphaAndOmega0•1h ago
https://nitter.net/AFpost/status/2017415163763429779?s=201
Something clearly went wrong in the process.
fredley•11m ago
I'm glad to know the real reason!