> So what’s happened here? Well, whoever collected these emails first converted from CRLF (i.e., “Windows” line ending coding) to “NL” (i.e., “Unix” line ending coding). This is pretty normal if you want to deal with email. But you then have one byte fewer:
I think there is a second possible conclusion, which is that the transformation happened historically. Everyone assumes these emails are an exact dump from Gmail, but isn't it possible that Epstein was syncing emails from Gmail to a third party mail server?
Since the Stackoverflow post details the exact situation in 2011, I think we should be open to the idea that we're seeing data collected from a secondary mail server, not Gmail directly.
Do we have anything to discount this?
(If I'm not mistaken, I think you can also see the "=" issue simply by applying the Quoted-Printable encoding twice, not just by mishandling the line-endings, which also makes me think two mail servers. It also explains why the "=" symbol is retained.)
In one of the email PDFs I saw an XML plist with some metadata that looked like it was from Apple's Mail.app, so these might be extracted from whatever internal format that uses.
Yeah, I wouldn't bet on this being a single bad Gmail export; it smells much more like the accumulated scars of multiple mail systems doing "helpful" things to the same messages over time
When they process these emails, it's fairly common to import everything into a MS Outlook PST file (using whatever buggy tool). That's probably why these look like Outlook printouts even though its Yahoo mail or etc.
What happened here is what always happens with all printed and digital material that goes through some evidentiary process.
The shot-callers demand the material, which is a task fobbed off onto some nobody intern who doesn't matter (deliberately, because the lawyers and career LEOs don't want any "officer of the court" or other "party" to put eyes on things they might need to deny knowing about later.) They use only the most primitive, mechanical method possible, with little to no discretion. The collected mass of mangled junk is then shipped to whoever, either in boxes or on CD-ROM/DVD (yes, still) or something. Then, the reverse process is done, equally badly, again by low-level staff, also with zero discretion and little to no technical knowledge or ability, for exactly the same reasons, to get the material into some form suitable for filing or whatever.
Through all of this, the subtle details of data formats and encodings are utterly lost, and the legal archive fills with mangled garbage like raw quoted-printable emails. The parties involved have other priorities, such as minimizing the number of people involved in the process, and tight control over the number of copies created. Their instinct is not to bring in a bunch of clever folk that might make the work product come out better, because "better" for them is different than "better" for Twitter or Facebook. Also, these disclosures are inevitably and invariably challenged by time: the obligation to provide one thing or another is fought to the last possible minute, and when the word does finally go out there is next to no time to piddle around with details.
In the Epstein case, the disclosures were done years ago, the original source material (computers, accounts, file systems, etc.) have all long since been (deliberately) destroyed, and what the feds have is the shrapnel we see today.
"BITNET was a co-operative university computer network in the United States founded in 1981 by Ira Fuchs at the City University of New York (CUNY) and Greydon Freeman at Yale University."
BITNET connected mainframes, had gateways to the Unix world and was still active in the 90s. And limited line lengths … some may remember SYSIN DD DATA … oh my goodness …
I don't think kids today realize how little memory we had when SMTP was designed.
For example, the PDP-11 (early 1970s), which was shared among dozens of concurrent users, had 512 kilobytes of RAM. The VAX-11 (late 1970s) might have as much as 2 megabytes.
Programmers were literally counting bytes to write programs.
Great. Can't wait for equal signs to be the next (((whatever this is))). Maybe it's a secret code. j/k
On a side note: There are actually products marketed as kosher bacon (it's usually beef or turkey). And secular Jews frequently make jokes like this about our kosher bros who aren't allowed to eat the real stuff for some dumb reason like it has too many toes.
I wrote my own email archiving software. The hardest part was dealing with all the weird edge cases in my 20+ year collection of .eml files. For being so simple conceptually, email is surprisingly complicated.
Email is one of those cursed standards where the committee wasn't building a protocol from scratch, but rather trying to build a universal standard by gluing together all of the independently developed existing systems in some way that might allow them to interoperate. Verifying that a string a user has typed is a valid email address is close to impossible short of just throwing up your hands and allowing anything with a @ somewhere in it.
We’ve become so accustomed to modern libraries handling encoding transparently that when raw data surfaces (like in these dumps), we often lack the 'Digital Archeology' skills to recognize basic Quoted-Printable.
These artifacts (=20, =3D) are effectively fossils of the transport layer. It’s a stark reminder that underneath our modern AI/React/JSON world, the internet is still largely held together by 7-bit ASCII constraints and protocols from the 1980s.
(The title of the blog reminded me the late Bob Pease [1] who had the signature, "What's all this XXX stuff, anyhow?" [2] where XXX might be "noise gain", "capacitor leakage"…)
The most interesting thing to me wasn't the equals signs, which I knew are from quoted-printable, but the fact that when an equals sign appears, a letter that should have been preceding or following it is missing. It's as if an off-by-one error has occurred, where instead of getting rid of the equals sign, it's gotten rid of part of the actual text. Perhaps the CRLF/LF thing is part of it.
For context, this is the Lars Ingebrigtsen who wrote the manual for Gnus[0], a common Emacs package for reading email and Usenet. It’s clever, funny, and wildly informative. Lars has probably forgotten more about email parsing than 99% of us here will ever have learned.
The manual itself says[1]:
> Often when I read the manual, I think that we should take a collection up to have Lars psycho-analysed.
42 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 49.0 ms ] threadI, too, was reading about the new Epstein files, wondering what text artifact was causing things to look like that.
Did the site get the HN kiss of death?
I wonder why even have a max line length limit in the first place? I.e. is this for a technical reason or just display related?
I think there is a second possible conclusion, which is that the transformation happened historically. Everyone assumes these emails are an exact dump from Gmail, but isn't it possible that Epstein was syncing emails from Gmail to a third party mail server?
Since the Stackoverflow post details the exact situation in 2011, I think we should be open to the idea that we're seeing data collected from a secondary mail server, not Gmail directly.
Do we have anything to discount this?
(If I'm not mistaken, I think you can also see the "=" issue simply by applying the Quoted-Printable encoding twice, not just by mishandling the line-endings, which also makes me think two mail servers. It also explains why the "=" symbol is retained.)
The shot-callers demand the material, which is a task fobbed off onto some nobody intern who doesn't matter (deliberately, because the lawyers and career LEOs don't want any "officer of the court" or other "party" to put eyes on things they might need to deny knowing about later.) They use only the most primitive, mechanical method possible, with little to no discretion. The collected mass of mangled junk is then shipped to whoever, either in boxes or on CD-ROM/DVD (yes, still) or something. Then, the reverse process is done, equally badly, again by low-level staff, also with zero discretion and little to no technical knowledge or ability, for exactly the same reasons, to get the material into some form suitable for filing or whatever.
Through all of this, the subtle details of data formats and encodings are utterly lost, and the legal archive fills with mangled garbage like raw quoted-printable emails. The parties involved have other priorities, such as minimizing the number of people involved in the process, and tight control over the number of copies created. Their instinct is not to bring in a bunch of clever folk that might make the work product come out better, because "better" for them is different than "better" for Twitter or Facebook. Also, these disclosures are inevitably and invariably challenged by time: the obligation to provide one thing or another is fought to the last possible minute, and when the word does finally go out there is next to no time to piddle around with details.
In the Epstein case, the disclosures were done years ago, the original source material (computers, accounts, file systems, etc.) have all long since been (deliberately) destroyed, and what the feds have is the shrapnel we see today.
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?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BITNET
BITNET connected mainframes, had gateways to the Unix world and was still active in the 90s. And limited line lengths … some may remember SYSIN DD DATA … oh my goodness …
https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/zos/2.1.0?topic=execution-systsi...
For example, the PDP-11 (early 1970s), which was shared among dozens of concurrent users, had 512 kilobytes of RAM. The VAX-11 (late 1970s) might have as much as 2 megabytes.
Programmers were literally counting bytes to write programs.
Back in those days optical scanners were still used.
On a side note: There are actually products marketed as kosher bacon (it's usually beef or turkey). And secular Jews frequently make jokes like this about our kosher bros who aren't allowed to eat the real stuff for some dumb reason like it has too many toes.
That said, there is a _possibly_ kosher pig: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babirusa#Relationship_with_hum...
Yeah clearly you guys are the biggest victims in all this... get in there and make it about you!
It never got too popular, but I had users for a few years and I can honestly say MIME was the bane of my life for most of those years.
> For some reason or other, people have been posting a lot of excerpts from old emails on Twitter over the last few days.
On the risk of having missed the latest meme or social media drama, but does anyone know what this "some reason or other" is?
Edit: Question answered.
https://pastes.io/correspond
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46843805
We’ve become so accustomed to modern libraries handling encoding transparently that when raw data surfaces (like in these dumps), we often lack the 'Digital Archeology' skills to recognize basic Quoted-Printable.
These artifacts (=20, =3D) are effectively fossils of the transport layer. It’s a stark reminder that underneath our modern AI/React/JSON world, the internet is still largely held together by 7-bit ASCII constraints and protocols from the 1980s.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Pease
[2] https://www.qsl.net/n9zia/pease/index.html
The manual itself says[1]:
> Often when I read the manual, I think that we should take a collection up to have Lars psycho-analysed.
0: https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_mono/gnus.htm...
1: https://www.gnus.org/manual.html