this post was submitted on 04 Feb 2026
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It has something to do with the way servers/protocol broke up emails into lines and stored the lines using = as demarcation. Whenever the emails were assembled, the = remained. We had a thread about it yesterday or the day before.
Do you have a link to that thread?
Because it often appears in place of 'I's and 'E's as if the emails were printed then re-digitalised with OCR(the top and bottom bars on I and E in certain fonts could trigger certain OCRs algos to read it as =)
It also appears to replace characters rather than being appended like you'd expect with a separation flag(chars in unused unicode spaces are also more likely to be used for that function than something commonly used in text like =), I could be wrong though so I'm interested in seeing the discussion
I do not. I just spent about 10 mins trying to find it. It's not in c/technology or c/chapotraphouse, that I can see. Searching "=" or any other relevant key words for posts or comments doesn't bring it up. IDK.
No worries, thanks for looking(I assume you also checked your browser history)
Maybe it was this I saw (thanks to astronot)
https://www.reddit.com/r/TrueAnon/comments/1quqk6q/this_is_where_all_those_equals_signs_in_the/
Really easy to confuse hexbear with r/trueanon since everyone just reposts from there all the time.
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Yeah it looks like the digital rot version of copier burn.
I don't have a link to the thread over here, but this article explains it in depth