Well, I spent too much time on this because it's the sort of thing I obsess over. It has to do with converting between different character sets and different transfer encodings.
I haven't looked at the actual text of emails in awhile, so this was entertaining. Using base64 for things that aren't attachments is apparently a thing now. Ken's response at 12:50PM Eastern doesn't have any weirdness, and has this MIME Type: Content-Type: text/plain; charset="Windows-1252" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable The plain text form of Ken's email starts with this: "We should stop calling them =93parties=94 because". The unicode characters for left quote and right quote are 0x93 and 0x94. The "quoted-printable" transfer encoding takes any non ANSI characters and converts them to [equal sign][unicode code point]. The reply from Mike Hammet has this MIME Type: Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8" Content-ID: <49B7C8C12D750744B41B6E674DB53042@1> Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64 It's still plain text, but now encoded in base64, and when you decode the base64 you see the all the =xxxx things because the base64 transfer coding takes them as literal whereas the original quoted-printable transfer encoding would have interpreted them as hexadecimal unicode characters. So, I guess maybe due to a font or character set choice, Ken's email client wants to use unicode left & right quotation marks rather than the ANSI 39 double quote. Presumably, Mike's email client decided quoted-printable encoding is stupid and it should send everything as base64. After skimming a few other posts to the list there seems to be a mixed bag. Myself and a lot of other people are sending messages with "quoted-printable" transfer encoding, but the character sets vary. Some Windows-1252, some iso-8859-1. A certain other set of people seem to always send with base64 transfer encoding and the utf-8 character set. Mike Hammett, Josh Luthman, and "Dev" for example. Mr. McCown apparently has an email client set for us-ascii. No transfer encoding specified (and none required). I'm not entirely clear how we got from =93parties=94 to =E2=80=9Cparties=E2=80=9D Maybe if we convert back and forth a few times it would become apparent. -Adam
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