Carolyn, You have so many choices due to the evolution of e-mail (and the same ones as everyone else). When e-mail first started it was all plain text. Plain text is exactly what its name states. You cannot format plain text with features like bold, italic, underline, color, etc. It's "black and white" (or monitor color and black for monochrome monitors - when did I last encounter one of those). It used to be conventional to denote italic by putting an asterisk before and after the word(s) or underlined by putting an underscore before and after the word(s). As people replied the prior text was generally pushed in using a single right angle bracket, >, before each level of reply. If something were replied to three times it would have >>> before it while something that you replied to for the first time would be included in the reply with a single > before each line of text.
Both HTML and RTF became "the big things" when people wanted e-mail that looked like word-processed documents do and to include things like click-through links so that you didn't have to copy a link and paste it in to your web browser. The vast majority of the e-mail I receive or send is HTML formatted because I use Gmail's web interface to send e-mail. Brian
