Enriched text

Enriched text is a formatted text format for e-mail, defined by the IETF in RFC 1896 and associated with the text/enriched MIME type. It is "intended to facilitate the wider interoperation of simple enriched text across a wide variety of hardware and software platforms". Today, enriched text is almost unknown in e-mail traffic, while HTML e-mail is widely used. Some people see enriched text, or at least the subset of HTML that can be transformed into enriched text, as a superior format for use with e-mail (mainly because of security considerations).

A predecessor of this text/enriched MIME type was called text/richtext in RFC 1341 and RFC 1521. Neither should be confused with Rich Text Format (MIME type text/rtf or application/rtf) which is an entirely different specification, devised by Microsoft.

A single newline in enriched text is treated as a space. Formatting commands are in the same style as SGML and HTML. They must be balanced and nested. These are in other words two examples of valid enriched text:

<bold><italic>Hello, world!</italic></bold>
 
<italic><bold>Hello, world!</bold></italic>

The following, on the other hand, is not:

<bold><italic>Hello, world!</bold></italic>

An example

As an example, the following enriched text:

<color><param>red</param>Blood</color> is <bold>thicker</bold> than
<color><param>blue</param>water</color>.
 
<paraindent><param>left</param><italic>-- Well-known proverb
</italic></paraindent>

would yield

Enriched text is a supported format of Emacs and Mulberry.

External links

• The text/enriched MIME Content-type
• Why HTML is Inappropriate for E-Mail