[OT] Gmail RTF/HTML (Was: Shut down times)

[Amedee Van Gasse (Ubuntu)]

On Mon, March 30, 2009 14:31, Derek Broughton wrote:
> Johnny Rosenberg wrote:
>
>
>> Now I clicked "unformatted text". Is this better?
>>
>
> Yes.
>
>>
>> The "unformatted text" link in GMail now changed to "RTF-format", so
>> it seems like it isn't html after all, not according to GMail anyway...
>
> From the viewpoint of email, RTF = HTML.  To send "RTF" it has to be
> wrapped in HTML.

Actually, RTF (or more precisely TNEF) is quite different from HTML.

I suspect that Google does this for combatibility with MS Exchange/MS
Outlook. That combination of MTA/MUA uses TNEF as its default message
format. Only when email leaves the Exchange infrastructure (or the Gmail
infrastructure), it is automagically converted from RTF (TNEF) to HTML.

As the receipient, you see nothing of this conversion, except when the
conversion fails and you receive winmail.dat attachments.

Did I mention that I'm doing tier 2 messaging support at a large
Indo-European steel company? I could tell lots of email horror stories...
:-)

-- 
Amedee