Read quoted-printable email source

An email's source shows Caf=C3=A9 au lait. Quoted-printable decode turns the =XX escapes back into the café you sent.

Tools used in this guide

Quoted-printable codec

The job

SMTP-era mail moves 7-bit ASCII. Quoted-printable keeps printable ASCII readable and escapes everything else as =XX byte pairs, with = at line end for soft wrapping. Any non-ASCII subject or accented name shows up encoded.

Decode and encode

Paste the raw body to decode — soft breaks join and =XX bytes become UTF-8 text. Encode does the reverse: UTF-8 in, quoted-printable out, soft-wrapped at 76 columns.

Worked example

Café au lait encodes to Caf=C3=A9 au lait — the é's two UTF-8 bytes each become an escape. Encoding 100 x's shows the wrap: 76 characters, =, then the rest on the next line. A malformed =4 fails cleanly instead of guessing.

Scope

Up to 200,000 characters either direction; trailing spaces are encoded so they survive transport. Header encoded-words like =?UTF-8?Q?…?= are a different layer — this tool handles the body transfer encoding only.