While rich/styled text would be useful in many situations, I'd rather strive for simplicity. With Unicode, plain text is already complicated as it is and the diversity in email client software means that plain-text is probably our best bet. As far as I know, most office emails are pretty much like text messages anyways. Also, it is possible to leave stylistic/visual cues in a plain-text email such as Important (: Not really sure if that is a good thing or a bad thing to write like this...

If we must track users, perhaps we can just give them a link they can visit?

What do you think about using attachments for documents where formatting is essential?

Attachments are just a differently tagged MIME part.

I was not aware of that. Sorry. I just meant that if we want to send a document that should look exactly as we send it, perhaps we should consider sending a PDF document or something.

Something I found interesting in the Wikipedia MIME article is:

> Text in character sets other than ASCII

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIME

If I so much as write க in Tamil, I rely on MIME. (Sorry if this is obvious to readers. I am not an email expert.) For others like me, the Wikipedia article on email spells it out:

> Originally an ASCII text-only communications medium, Internet email was extended by Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME) to carry text in other character sets and multi-media content attachments. International email, with internationalized email addresses using UTF-8, has been standardized, but not yet widely adopted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email

Sorry for going off on a tangent. I appreciate your reply as I learned something new today. (: