Peter is this readable? Hans Sorry to be jumping into this late but I've been away. I am confused as to the source of the problem. I read the hecnet list using VMS Mail and I therefore get to see all the headers in their gorey detail. I've never seen any mail from the list arrive with base64 encoding. I've had a quick look through the headers for all the hecnet mail for the last few days. I find some mails have Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT and others have Content-transfer-encoding: 8BIT (including some that are not from Hans). Just one mail (the HTML section of a mail from Jordi Guillaumes i Pons) had Content-transfer-encoding: quoted-printable and none at all had Content-transfer-encoding: base64. In particular, the ones from Hans do not arrive here with Content-transfer-encoding: base64 I can't see anything special about the mails from Hans that would be causing those and only those to result in difficulties on a 7bit only system. Perhaps a mail transfer agent processing mail for the system experiencing the problem is making incorrect assumptions about some of the mails going through it and somewhat arbitrarily deciding to convert some of them to base64? (I do see some headers such as X-Spam-Status: containing references to base64 but this should have no bearing on how the mail is processed.) Regards, Peter Coghlan.