Even my very nice Mac Mail.app will add these extraneous marks if there is so much as a single non-ascii character. Someone might type an entire email, all ascii and smooth, then copy/ paste 4′33″ from firefox/wikipedia, let's say, and it will throw the whole message into showing the quoted-printable characters. Replying to a post that has the = characters will also throw it into "ugly" mode. Just making sure it's Text Only and not Rich Text (Mac's Mail.app format), isn't enough, they show up in Text only. If I remember, I'll copy a questionable post into BBEdit and select Text > Convert to ASCII, but sometimes I'll forget. It's a non- technical list and the people can only be trained so much. To get them not to quote the entire digest or to abandon html is significant. We can't expect too much more. Shouldn't there be a way to eliminate such characters on the Owner/ Admin level? One tech list I'm on, using a custom ezmlm/idx, somehow manages to eliminate all these characters, even when someone adds something like a left double quote, “, or any other of the option extended character sets. LISTSERV works very well for this other group, but the combination of =20s and hard wrap lines (done as a compromise, and for one particular archive engine being used) makes messages hard to read. Kathy -- wondering whether this will wrap with =20 at the end of every line