title: How to understand the equal sign '=' symbol in IMAP email text?
body: <p>I am currently using Python imaplib to process email text.</p>
  
  <p>I use fetch command to fetch the raw data email from GMail server. However, I found one thing really tricky - the equal sign '='. It is not a normal equal sign but a special symbol.</p>
  
  <p>For example:</p>
  
  <ol>
  <li><p>'=' sometimes acts as the hyphenation mark at the end of text line:</p>
  
  <pre><code>Depending upon your module selections, course lecturers may also contact yo=
  u with preparatory work over the next few weeks. It would be wise to start =
  reviewing the preparatory reading lists provided on the module syllabi now =
  </code></pre></li>
  <li><p>Sometimes, it acts as a escape mark similar to '%', for example:</p>
  
  <p><code>a=20b</code> is actually <code>a&lt;SPACE&gt;b</code><br>
  <code>=46rom here</code> is actually <code>From here</code></p></li>
  </ol>
  
  <p>I am totally confused about such weird notation. I think there must be a guidance to handle this because GMail can handle such thing correctly in their apps.</p>
  
  <p>I see that this is related to HTML encoding, just like '%' will be encoded. But the problem is, all I get from the IMAP response is a string that contain this '=' symbol. How should I handle this? Using regular expression?</p>