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[return to "What's up with all those equals signs anyway?"]
1. tibors+Qa[view] [source] 2026-02-03 11:09:26
>>todsac+(OP)
> We see that that’s a quite a long line. Mail servers don’t like that

Why do mail server care about how long a line is? Why don't they just let the client reading the mail worry about wrapping the lines?

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2. Pinus+Uc[view] [source] 2026-02-03 11:25:06
>>tibors+Qa
As far as I can remember, most mail servers were fairly sane about that sort of thing, even back in the 90’s when this stuff was introduced. However, there were always these more or less motivated fears about some server somewhere running on some ancient IBM hardware using EBCDIC encoding and truncating everything to 72 characters because its model of the world was based on punched cards. So standards were written to handle all those bizarre systems. And I am sure that there is someone on HN who actually used one of those servers...
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3. tibors+tf[view] [source] 2026-02-03 11:41:39
>>Pinus+Uc
Thanks, I really expected a tale from the 70's, but did not see punch cards coming :)
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4. jibal+Sl[view] [source] 2026-02-03 12:23:17
>>tibors+tf
The influence of 80 column punch cards remains pervasive.
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