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Yesterday, I received a very strange email from a friend of mine. It was originally very hard to read and dribbled with extra characters, but I believe this is relatively the original message. It doesn't format correctly with how it looks in the post, no matter what I do, so head here to see it properly. Your mission: Help me find the true message in this email

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I've fixed the formatting for you. Feel free to roll back if I accidentally broke something. – Deusovi♦ 4 hours ago
    
@Deusovi unfortunately, you did. That's actually what I originally tried, but then I found that it doesn't work that way, whether it's copying straight from the code box or copying after clicking edit – Saiid 4 hours ago
    
Then I suggest using Pastebin. – Deusovi♦ 4 hours ago
    
@Deusovi lel kk – Saiid 4 hours ago
up vote 7 down vote accepted

The hidden message is:

This was a waste of time to code :P

Explanation:

There is a programming language called Whitespace.

The interesting thing about this language is that the only valid characters are newlines, spaces and tabs. Because of this, it's relatively easy to embed in other text, or even other code.

When I saw the strange indentation/formatting as well as just the strange structure of the text overall, I had a hunch the whitespace was significant. Since the text mentions "coding" a lot, I guessed it might be a programming language. After pasting the entire text into an online interpreter, it produced that hidden message.

Easter egg:

At first glance, it seems that the email is addressed to someone named "Edwin". Line 7 says "Ediwn, I just wanted...". However, line 76 is addressed to "Brady".

This is a reference to the original author of the whitespace programming language, "Edwin Brady".

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Well done. Might want to put more of that in a spoiler, though :P – Saiid 3 hours ago

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