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 :-)  As long as  the message cannot  be made  useful to
non-MIME readers, I agree there is no point in making it unusable to MIME
readers.  It is  a  totally  different story  when  you're talking  about
regular text messages  with national characters. We've  been dealing with
these successfully (at least in Scandinavia) well before MIME existed. We
had a perfectly working network, and MIME looked like it would provide an
even better  solution, but  some people  decided to  force MIME  down the
throats of our users ahead of its  time, and the result was that from one
day to the  other, users who'd been  talking to each other  just fine for
years started  exchanging gibberish.  Users generally expect  network and
computer things to  improve with time, and don't take  too kindly to this
kind  of accidents.  The  victims saw  MIME  as the  thing  that made  it
impossible  to send  mail to  their brother  without transliterating  the
national characters, or speaking English,  when it worked fine before. Of
course we're  pushing MIME  harder than  English-speaking people  do, but
there are still a lot of users who can't handle it.
 
  Eric