Article 7064 of vmsnet.mail.mx:
In article <3274C690.FF6@lsl.co.uk>, Bill James <bill@lsl.co.uk> writes:
>We rely on VMS forwarding to distribute mail to other platforms
>on our site. Is there a mechanism to stop VMS effectively substituting
>its own header lines (followed by an empty line)? This stops most mail 
>readers from interpreting the original headers, preventing MIME stuff
>from being spotted, for instance.
>
>Bill 
>-- 
>Bill James (bill@lsl.co.uk)		  Laser-Scan Ltd, 
>Systems Development Manager		  Science Park, Milton Rd,
>Tel: 01223 420414  Fax: 01223 420044      Cambridge, CB4 4FY, UK.

Short answer,  no.  If you use MAIL, DECW$MAIL, or callable MAIL it
will ALWAYS stick the headers on, followed by a blank line.  If you 
use VMS MAIL to forward anything to another system you will massacre
the message's MIME headers.   However, there are ways around this by
bypassing the callable MAIL and going directly to the SMTP transport.  See,
for instance, the Israeli port of "pine" (from vms.huji.ac.il, directory = 
LOCAL), or this procedure: 

  http://seqaxp.bio.caltech.edu:8000/pub/software/mmail.com

PMDF from Innosoft may offer general ways around this problem, we don't
have it, so I'm not sure, but they do offer their own port of Pine.

Regards,

David Mathog
mathog@seqaxp.bio.caltech.edu
Manager, sequence analysis facility, biology division, Caltech