Question: When sending out HTML emails via PEAR, although it renders correctly on email clients, when looking at the message source the text has lots of `=` signs.

**Example**

> 
> blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah
>  blah=blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah
>  blah blah blah blah=blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah
>  blah blah blah blah blah blah= blah blah blah blah blah blah
> 
> 
> 

Any ideas why and how they can be removed? Do they cause any issues?

Answer: 
It is part of the (oldschool but still used!) quoted-printable encoding that represents a 8-bit ASCII string in 7-bit ASC codeset. All characters that are >127 are encoded in the form `=F3`, which is a hexadecimal representation of the character. Read more at [Wikipedia on quoted-printable](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quoted-printable) 

To read the message, you must apply [`quoted_printable_decode()`](http://en.php.net/manual/de/function.quoted-printable-decode.php) to the string. or use a proper MIME Mail decoder that will resolve other issue's that you will encounter when trying to parse mails, too.

It does not cause issues - it solves them.
They are part of the quoted-printable encoding and must be present in order to read the message properly.