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