Well, just to give an alternative opinion... Quoted: ---------------------- Sending E-mail in formats other than "Plain/Text" is a badly conceived idea, in my humble opinion - doing so contradicts all the internet conventions and standards which established the universal accessibility of this miraculous medium in the first place. ---------------------- Plain text email dates from the days when teletypes were used as the communications medium of choice. i.e. 1970 or so. Teletypes usually could only print about 93 characters, which fit American English fine, but didn't easily fit into a programming "word" size (8-bits at that time for most things). Thus 128 character ascii was born, using 7-bits, which allowed all of the American English characters with some room left over for things like new lines, EOT, and BEL. Those early versions of Unix which formed the backbone of the Internet were developed and deployed in places which had no money for new-fangled terminals. They used 7-bit character sets because that's what worked in their environment, not because it was the best choice. Thus, much of what you see in email is not the best technological choice, but just people blindly following the standards set down in a by-gone era, based on economic choices which are no longer valid. Universally accessible? Not really -- tell that to someone in the Far East or Middle East. They use character sets which require something more than plain text. Anyone who has done i18n programming realizes that our 7-bit heritage is very inadequate once you get beyond our borders. 7-bit character sets came from USA programming -- because we had these darned teletypes originally, and got used to them, and we could afford to be lazy. In MY humble opinion, Plain/Text has had its day, and is long due to be relegated to the history books. You may quibble about the pro's and con's of HTML vs RTF vs whatever, but the point of email is communications. And there are better ways to communicate than via plain text. Feel free to flame away. -- Chris Anderson Director, Technical Support Unify Corporation