I have a LAMP web application that emails users. Some users have complained that instead of seeing html email messages, they see weird sequences of characters such as =0D or =3D. I can't reproduce this bug with any of my email clients : gmail, yahoo mail, hotmail, thunderbird, blackberry or iphone. Does anyone know what's going on and how to fix this?
It's an email encoding system called "quoted-printable", which allows non-ASCII characters to be represented as ASCII for email transportation. In quoted-printable, any non-standard email octets are represented as an = sign followed by two hex digits representing the octet's value.
If you see strange characters in a received message, click the Encoding button on the ribbon and select a different one, like Unicode (UTF-8). If this makes the text display properly, you may find it best to leave Use default encoding for all incoming messages not selected.
This is called quoted printable encoding. Some system that handles the mail while it is being delivered to the recipients that are seeing the offending characters messes up the encoding or the header information about the encoding.
Check whether the encoding you are setting when sending the mail matches what you are writing to the mail and whether that is also what is received by other people.
When you see something like =3D, what you're seeing is a single character in what's called "quoted-printable" encoding. "=3D" is, in fact, an equal sign. =0D is a Carriage Return (CR), =0A is a Line Feed (LF)
Taken from Not all 'plain-text' is created equal...
The link will provide an in-depth detailed description as to what is going on.
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