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