what is the relationship between GUIs and MIME? Robin can decode Mime attachments like anyone else, using the keyboard. Of course if his correspondent sends him a Word file, he'll need to load Word to read it, but if its a MIME-encoded .tex file, he'll have no problem. perhaps I am just being smug because i finally got a working MIME setup for Gnu Emacs and the VM mail reader, after 1000001 tries :-} seems to me that emacs gives you best of all worlds these days; you can drive everything with keystrokes, explicit commands, menus or mice. since it can even talk to you with Raman's emacsspeak it'll even do for we oldies when our eyesight goes. off-topic or what? Sebastian