I'd like to point out that the strange occurrences of the "=3D" string are due to the fact that the message was originally a "quoted-printable" encoded email and for whatever reason this artifact wasn't removed when posted to the web. Perhaps this was pipermail's fault?

Anyway, when reading the code, you're safe in assuming "=3D" is just a single plain old equal sign. In the "quoted-printable" encoding scheme the two characters following an equal sign are the hex value of the intended character. In effect, equal signs need to be escaped using the "=3D" sequence.

This drove me a little nuts as I was reading and trying to code switch between the assorted languages used in the examples.