Setting aside philosophical or religious considerations, trying to make
subscribers not use QP encoding is a lost cause. It would have to be a very
small list of reasonably technical people, and there would still be cases
where the messages MUST be encoded.

The "Translate=" keyword is not about removing QP encoding. In general, you
cannot remove QP encoding because it is usually necessary. I realize that
there are mail clients that use it whether necessary or not, but in most
cases, encoding is present when mandatory. Even if one were to decide to
decode the messages anyway, a lot of mail servers will re-encode them on the
fly if they determine that encoding is required.

LISTSERV has supported QP encoding for as long as it has existed, so I am
puzzled as to why you are having this problem. There is only one known
scenario where it doesn't work, and it is if you are using the old SHORTHDR
or SHORT822 subscription options. These options date from the days when most
mail programs did not support Internet mail, but whatever proprietary mail
system the organization had chosen. Internet mail would be injected into
these systems through a gateway, and somehow the gateway developers appeared
to have agreed to dump all the Internet mail headers right at the top of the
message, requiring the user to go down a few pages before the actual message
started. Hence the popularity of "short headers," which included just the
date, message origin, subject, and recipient. These fields also happened to
be the ones that gateways would import into the non-Internet mail system (at
least the date and subject), so overall there was very little "junk" left at
the top of the message and people could start reading the actual message
right away. Of course, short headers are not appropriate for a normal
Internet mail client. Some very old lists may still have them on by default.

The changes made after 1.8d (or perhaps it was 1.8c) improve LISTSERV's
ability to process commands sent to the LISTSERV address with MIME encoding.
Initially there was no such support, then there was basic decoding support,
and that worked fine for a while, but as electronic stationery and other
doubtful improvements were introduced in mail clients, it was not enough to
be able to decode the commands, you also had to figure out which of the 17
enclosures in the message was the actual text typed by the user. Another
area of improvement is content filtering - the removal of unwanted
enclosures or attachments.

  Eric