Why old emails show random equals signs - and what it reveals about data migration

A viral social media thread in early February 2026 asked why old email excerpts display random equals signs. The answer matters for enterprise IT: it's a visible symptom of improper email archival and migration.

What's actually happening

The equals signs serve two technical functions defined in RFC 2047's quoted-printable encoding:

1. Line continuation markers: Mail servers limit line length to 76 characters. Email software breaks longer lines and appends = to indicate continuation. Proper rendering removes these characters. The formal sequence is =CRLF (equals sign, carriage return, line feed).

2. Character encoding: =C2=A0 represents a non-breaking space. =C2 followed by other codes handles accented letters and international characters - what Lars Ingebrigtsen, who wrote this technical breakdown, calls "rock döts."

Where conversion breaks

The problem emerges during CRLF-to-NL conversion (Windows to Unix line endings). The three-character sequence =CRLF becomes two characters: =NL. Naive parsing algorithms that don't account for this lose context.

Worse, some conversion tools use search-replace instead of proper RFC 2047 decoders. According to a 2012 StackOverflow discussion, when parsers encounter = not followed by valid hex digits or proper line breaks, they default to displaying the character rather than handling the encoding error gracefully.

Why this matters for enterprise

Microsoft flagged this as a known issue in Windows Live Mail in 2006. Twenty years later, it persists in email archives because:

• Migration tools still use improper format conversion
• Archival systems strip protocol context
• OCR and scanning get blamed for what's actually a parsing failure

Ingebrigtsen's assessment: "Whoever processed these mails are incompetent." The real question is how many enterprise email migrations are making the same mistakes with current data.

For organizations moving email archives between systems - particularly government agencies with long retention requirements - this isn't academic. Visible encoding characters signal deeper problems with how migration tools handle standard protocols. The equals signs are just what you can see.