applicability of Rich Text Format for e-mail

[Keith Moore <moore@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Microsoft's Rich Text Format appears to be an attempt to define an intermediate
format to allow transfer of word processor documents between different systems
with little loss of information.  It does this by allowing the representation
of various document attributes as printable ASCII characters.

RTF is NOT designed for representation of electronic mail messages.  In
particular, it has lots of ways to define things like headers, footers, margins,
gutters, paper size, etc., that are more or less meaningless in e-mail.  It
requires a larger character set than recommended in Appendix I of the RFC XXXX
draft for e-mail interchange; in particular, it uses tilde, vertical bar, and
backslash.  Line breaks are sometimes significant (e.g. in pictures), providing no
way to break long lines.  

It may be possible to define an e-mail safe subset of RTF.  However, even if such
a subset were defined, it is apparent that most RTF documents produced by word
processors would not be generally mailable, without changes to each of the various
word processors to enforce the restrictions.

Finally, RTF is somewhat ambitious in trying to create a universal document format.
As a result, it is difficult to implement completely and correctly.  The RFC XXXX
"richmail" format has no such pretentions, and is easy to implement.

Since the names "Rich Text Format" and RTF are already in use, it might be a good
idea to change the name in RFC XXXX from "richmail" to something else, so as to
distinguish one from the other.  How about "working-class-text"? :-)

Keith