> >I'm afraid I disagree.  The only crucial part of a  MIME message that is
> >not part of  the body of the message is  the MIME-Version: header, which
> >is pretty innocuous compared to what the body of the message looks like.
> That is not correct. There are  two other vital tags, "Content-Type:" and
> "Content-Transfer-Encoding:".
 
You are correct. Thanks.
 
> >Like  it or  not,  MIME is  here,  and is  seeing  increasing use.  PMDF
> >produces MIME messages by default,
> And that's a  serious mistake (I mean  to the extent that  it will base64
> encode any message  with one or more 8-bit characters).  There is still a
> majority of users  that cannot read such messages.
 
Of course, the counter-argument is that this is one of the major
driving forces for the wide deployment of MIME, and it appears to
be working.
 
The point I want to focus on, though, is that by *not* passing
these headers, the rest of the message body is rendered useless.
I understand the reasoning behind why LISTSERV removes
unnecessary headers. My argument is that the MIME headers are
becoming necessary, and should be passed through as part of the
default set.
 
> popular belief on your side of  the big pond, quoted-printable is not any
> better. When the escaped characters are your everyday vowels, rather than
> an occasional weird letter in a foreign  address, and you have as many as
> 12 possible codes in both upper  and lower case form, quoted-printable is
> just as convenient to read for the average user as base64.
 
I agree that QP is not the best possible solution. Try sending
something in Quecha Maya some time, if you want a really
unreadable message...8-).
 
We've argued about this before. MIME appears to be the first
really interoperable method of moving binary attachments through
mail. LISTSERV is relatively tolerant of this usage, but I'd like
to see it be easier still.