The elm mailer as distributed with 5.2 appears to be missing MIME support. To check: (the hard way) try reading a mime-encoded mail message. The MIME information is printed as part of the message, as are any attachments (the easy way) strings /usr/bin/elm | grep metamail The correct result is metamail -p -z -m Elm %s but on RedHat 5.2/i386 the string is not found. (In an environment where people routinely send lunch announcements as MS Word attachments, this is a nuisance!)
Fixed in elm-2.5.0-0.2pre8 (should be in Red Hat 6.0).
I don't understand why this bug is listed as resolved. I have elm-2.5.0-0.2pre8, and metamail-2.7-20 under RH 6.0, and the behavior is the same as described in this report. The configure option MIME_RECV does not appear to have been set during compilation.