> I think there is a misunderstanding. It now seems that you guys have been
> talking about "genuine"  MIME messages, with multimedia  stuff and binary
> exhibits (what  "MIME" stands  for, in other  words). These  messages are
> clearly  not  usable  unless  you  have a  MIME  mail  program  and  some
> multimedia applications, and there's  nothing an intermediary server like
> LISTSERV can do  to help non-MIME users  with these. I on  the other hand
> was talking about plain text messages that just happened to be MIME-ified
> on the  basis that there  were non-ASCII  characters that might  get lost
> otherwise,  and with  the result  that  only a  select few  can read  the
> message. I only see the former in  RFC examples, whereas I run across the
> latter every  day :-)
 
Actually, I wasn't talking about either one.  What I see the most of are
regular text messages that happen to be sent in MIME format.  They are
readable with a non-MIME reader, but are much nicer witha MIME reader.
By the way, the mail reader I normally use is not MIME-aware.