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Could be an artefact of OCR, you get a hell of a lot of similar symbols replacing random letters in older scanned-in versions of text that is then uploaded. If someone was scanning in original emails then running them through some kind of conversion to PDF format, I wouldn't be surprised if such errors crept in.
Ever tried getting Adobe PDF converted to Microsoft Word? Even with all the updates, it's still a pain for this kind of detail.
No, as DenpaEnthusiast alluded to in his reply, it's some email program getting confused and mishandling quoted-printable encoding, part of the Internet email standards. Basically, the original SMTP mail protocol wasn't "8-bit clean", it dodn't allow anything but printable ASCII characters (32-127) in the message body, so if you wanted to send a message with one of the characters in the 128-255 range (like, say, the various accented characters of European languages), you needed to use this "quoted-printable" mechanism to escape the character by representing it by an equals sign followed by the hex representation of the character. Also, equals signs by themselves represented "fake" line breaks, as the original SMTP protocol didn't allow lines longer than 80 characters. The gory details are all in Chapter 6.7 of the standards document RFC 2045.
Today I learned more than I knew yesterday!
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