Jeff Davies jeff@llandre.freeserve.co.uk writes:

...

Because the encoding could cause problems for those who get mailing list in digest form.

Look, I still don't understand.

Try this: when you splat a MIME attachment into the middle of a plain text message (such as one of the digest versions), it is no longer readable as an attachment, so is just useless spew. If viewed with certain MIME-capable clients, it will even be seen as a malformed message and may make the entire digest unusable.

Mailing lists that I run specifically disallow attachments. Quite aside from the digest-buggery, they are an amazing waste of bandwidth for something which most people will not care about.

Understand now?

Thanks to the rest for tolerating this short interlude. I now return you to your normal conversation.