That's true for SMTP, and that's what I'm referring to. Am I wrong? You are making the same mistake other posters were making, confusing two different definiti

That's true for SMTP, and that's what I'm referring to. Am I wrong? You are making the same mistake other posters were making, confusing two different definitions of "plain text". The one we're talking about is ASCII versus some binary obfuscated format (such as MS Word). Both can be encrypted and made equally as secure. Plain text formats are much more amenable to grepping, grokking and manipulation; they make locking out competing implementations harder. See "Keep Knowledge in Plain Text": http://pragmatictips.com/20 http://pragmatictips.com/20 In addition, most arguments about "space savings" are rendered moot by compression (which usually works better on plain text), the fact that binary formats in practice almost always take up more space for the same content (even when uncompressed), and most importantly, storage and bandwidth have rendered the size argument totally irrelevant.