Why does the digest have these “=XX” things in it?

=XX (with various XX) shows up mostly in Corgi-L digests when the message author has a particular plain text setting. Unfortunately not all can change this setting, or would be able to.

It’s kind of like the HTML versus plain text issue, but much more obscure. It’s more like there’s plain text, and then there’s plain text.

In a nutshell, in addition to selecting “plain text” format, everyone also should set their “mime encoding” to “none”.

Unfortunately there are a few problems with that:

  • it’s an extremely obscure setting that most people don’t understand.
  • not all email programs allow you to change it.
  • they may need a different setting for other reasons.

It’s further complicated by the listserv “digester” for various reasons.

Corgi-L admin Leo Notenboom wrote it up in more detail here: Why does my email sometimes show up with funny characters like “=0D” in it?

If you’re experiencing this problem, we really only have two suggestions:

  • live with it (sorry)
  • switch to individual emails rather than digest. It appears to happen much less this way.

And yes, we apologize for the inconvenience.