The only digest format that can be expected to work in the general case is
the MIME format. I appreciate that there are still a few mail clients that
do not support it, but the fact is that MIME is the only way to transmit a
collection of arbitrary incoming messages. There is just no other way. The
legacy plain-text digest format is not going to work unless ALL of the
following is true:

- There are no attachments.

- Only ASCII (English) characters are used on the list.

- The messages are not encoded.

There are still quite a few newsletters where this is the case. The editors
control the format of the newsletter, and can decide to only send plain
English text with no encoding. But on a discussion list, this is hopeless.
People will use whatever mail clients they are used to, and you will get a
lot of HTML "letterhead," electronic business cards and so on. Even if
people only use English on the list, there will be the occasional non-ASCII
character for bullet points or the like. People who live in a non-English
speaking country will often have national characters in their name and/or
signature, even if they stick to English on the list. Poster 1 will have
Greek characters, poster 2 will have Cyrillic, etc. This is the problem MIME
was invented to solve. Anything short of MIME is going to be a kludge that
works a little bit more often than the current plain-text digest, at the
expense of breaking in a few scenarios that work fine today. It is honestly
not the right solution. Mail clients that do not support MIME digests can be
improved, or replaced with a web-based client that anyone can access.

This being said, I do agree that the web interface should not encode
messages that do not require it. I will see what can be done about that.

  Eric