On Sun, Dec 31, 2023 at 10:51:25PM -0500, Paul M Foster wrote:
> Apparently, something was wrapping lines to
> about 75 characters, and putting an equals sign at the end of every line
> which had been wrapped.
This is "quoted-printable" encoding. You need to use a properly decoded
version of the file, rather than the raw text.[1]
> As a solution, I took that email from my mutt mail file and stripped out
> all the headers and non-HTML content. Then I fed that to my browser.
If you received a correctly formatted email, it should contain one or more
parts, each of which is identified by a MIME Content-Type. Pressing 'v'
while reading the message takes you to a page which shows you the parts
in a tree form.
Use the arrow keys to select the part you want to save (in this case, the
text/html one), and then save it to a file. I use "foo.html" usually,
and just overwrite foo.html every time.
Have your browser load THAT file.
[1] The SMTP standard requires all transmitted lines to be 1000 characters
or less, and to contain only 7-bit ASCII characters. Therefore, any
content which doesn't conform to these restrictions has to be encoded.
The two choices for encoding are quoted-printable, and base64.
Quoted-printable is nearly human-readable, and is more efficient if
there are relatively few 8-bit characters or long lines, so it's
a common choice. Some MUAs will use q-p even on files that don't
*strictly* need it, just in case.
