mildly OT from bidi - curious email

[Julian Bradfield via Unicode]

The current bidi discussion prompts me to post a curiosity I received
today.

I ordered something from a (UK) company, and the payment receipt came
via Stripe. So far, so common. The curious thing is that the (entirely
ASCII) company name was enclosed in a left-to-right direction, thus:

Subject: Your <LRE>Aaaaaaa Ltd<POP> receipt [#nnnn-nnnn]

where <LRE> and <POP> are the bidi control characters.

I don't think I've seen this before - I wonder why it happened?

Also today I got an otherwise ASCII message where every paragraph
started with BOM (or ZWNBSP as my font prefers to call it). I see from
the web that people used to do this - anybody know what the most
common software packages that do it are?



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