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this post was submitted on 05 Feb 2026
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Chapotraphouse
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Having read the article, it doesn't seem to explain anything here. They're saying the = signs are either preceding UTF-8 sequence (hex) or used to indicate newlines in sentences that exceed SMTP line length (76 characters).
y is not valid hex, so =9y isn't a UTF-8 sequence, and the line is way less than 76 characters.
I think they stripped all the emojis.
Possible explanation:
It said
😛😛😛19yoencoded as=D83D=DE1B=D83D=DE1B=D83D=DE1B=␍␊19yo, with=␍␊added to break the line at 76 chars. Some encoding error in the export replaced␍␊with␊, and=␊1isn’t a valid QP code. A buggy converter then incorrectly replaced it with=, leaving=9yo.I haven’t counted the characters to see if this is plausible, but you can play with something like this to see if anything lines up: https://textmagictools.com/tools/quoted-printable-converter
If it's emoji that are being stripped, then that opens a whole load of possible missing meanings/implications in messages. Like it wouldn't surprise me if there was some kind of code where a particular emoji followed by a legal age actually means something else, like a simple age - x calculation
Although most of what I've seen in there leads me to believe that they, for the most part, weren't speaking in codes. Sometimes they smugly hint at a subject without mentioning it at all, but most of the time they're just like "yeah we'll be doing some crimes starting at 8:30pm tomorrow, make sure you're ready to do plenty of crime!"
Yeah, if emojis and other special characters have been stripped, a lot of these messages could change meaning entirely, that's a pretty big deal if so.
I agree, that seems like a big deal. But this email is from 2013, the emoji keyboard was added to the iPhone internationally in 2011 to great fanfare, these are the most annoying boomers in the entire world, and I haven’t seen a single emoji in any of these emails.
In my mind it’s inconceivable that they didn’t strip the emoji. From all the
=s it seems that that some poor guy at the FBI had to write a script to clean up the QP-encoded emails, too. Unicode is hard, and I’d be more surprised if they didn’t throw out everything over 7 bits.