I have a department colleague who assumes that everyone else has exactly the same e-mail program that he has. When he first found out he could e-mail a formatted file from his word processor, I started getting long attachments that were uuencoded. When I uudecoded them, I would find he was using a different wordprocessor than I use. And rather than sending the file in a format of an earlier version of his wordprocessor that my older wordprocessor could probably import he would always send the file formatted in the very latest version that mine knew nothing about. Later he got a new e-mail system that encoded in mime; I could deal with that. But his most recent exposition came encoded in Binhex 4.0 which I had always associated with Macintosh users.
I hunted here and there to find a PC program that could deal with Binhex, but had no luck. Then I finally walked over to the computer center and asked for help. I was given the following WWW address: http://www.shareware.com/, and I contacted them from the privacy of my own office. One can search by platform and by key word(s). I requested programs that would work in Windows and involved the term "binhex." Within a short time I was offered the choice of a half dozen programs that would convert Binhex at a number of sites around the world. I selected one that could handle most forms of encoding for e-mail. It worked like a charm. And if my colleague keeps sending me stuff in Binhex (and it is more interesting than the last message) I may actually send some money to the shareware author.