A "MIME digest"  is just a different digest format  which is specified in
the MIME  RFCs and which  allows a MIME  compliant reader to  present the
message in  a more convenient  form and to  process every message  in the
digest as a MIME  message. This does not mean that  all MIME mail readers
will do  it (digest support  is optional), that  they do it  equally well
(some just  show the whole digest  as a single, large  message), nor that
all the messages  in the digest will  be MIME messages. It  means that if
you have the  right kind of mail program (Pegasus  for instance), it will
be easier to  read the digest. In addition, if  MIME messages are present
in the digest, they will be processed  correctly and not have =E9 and the
like. In my  experience, MIME-capable mail readers are  also 8-bit clean,
so in a  national situation where everyone uses the  same code page there
will be no problem with incoming unencoded 8-bit messages.
 
As  for "MIME  archives",  what  I meant  is  that  LISTSERV will  always
preserve the MIME header fields in  the list archive files. I don't think
it would be  appropriate for LISTSERV to encode  non-MIME messages before
saving them to the archives. In fact,  if any such conversion is made, it
should be  in the  other direction.  Archive files  are often  browsed by
users of the machine LISTSERV runs on, and the MIME encoding just gets in
the way, since there  is no standard way to tell  your mail program "Take
that disk file and turn it into a folder for me".
 
  Eric