>> Again,
how on earth cna you know what the fault is if you can't
>> diagnos=
> e
I'm wondering what the heck it is that's breaking words, inserting
equal signs, and equal-sign-followed-by-20 in various places in the
quoted material here...
In a word, MIME. What you describe is basically MIME's
quoted-printable encoding.
In theory, text that does not meet SMTP's restrictions (on line length,
character set, etc) is encoded by the sender and decoded by the reader.
The practice is rather less neat, but going into detail here would take
us rather far afield from classic computing.
In this case, what happened is probably that either the sender's
software encoded the text but failed to correctly mark the text as
encoded, or the receiver's software failed to decode it before doing
the "> " quoting to it and generating the initial draft of the
response. (If I had to pick one as more likely, I'd pick the second.
Classic-computing email software is comparatively likely to predate
MIME and thus, of course, not handle it "correctly".
See RFCs 2045 through 2049, and their updates, for more on MIME.
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