The manual itself says[1]:

> Often when I read the manual, I think that we should take a collection up to have Lars psycho-analysed.

0: https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_mono/gnus.htm...

1: https://www.gnus.org/manual.html

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?

> For some reason or other, people have been posting a lot of excerpts from old emails on Twitter over the last few days.

On the risk of having missed the latest meme or social media drama, but does anyone know what this "some reason or other" is?

Edit: Question answered.

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.)

https://pastes.io/correspond

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

Did the site get the HN kiss of death?

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

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

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

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?

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.

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

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.

Back in those days optical scanners were still used.