In a message dated 11/10/2004 5:43:49 PM Eastern Standard Time, "Michael, Lee" <[log in to unmask]> writes:

>I did a quick test and when I saved Peter's message as an msg file, it
>was 21kb.  When I saved the same message as an rtf, it was 2kb.

when you save it as an RTF I think that prevents you from then being able to make a reply or to forward the message later on

Just discovered something else with Outlook that if you try to save a message and it contains a hyperlink in it you can not save it as an RTF

In addition there is a recent court case in which the court ruled that one of the parties HAD to produce the email messages in pst format converting them back from TIFF (which contained Bates stamping and redaction)

here is the case info (from Cricket Technologies)
<snip>
In re Verisign, Inc., No. C 02-02270 JW, 2004 WL 2445243 (N.D. Cal. March 10, 2004)
(updated on Nov/10/2004 11:58 pm EST)
Categories: Production Methodology
Summary: In this class action securities case, the federal court affirmed the
magistrate judge's order requiring defendants to produce all electronic evidence in
native electronic form and rejecting defendant's request to be permitted to produce
a TIFF version without metadata. Defendants argued that requiring them to produce
hundreds of thousands of documents in native .pst format was contrary to the
federal rules and unduly burdensome since they had reviewed and annotated the
documents in TIFF format and would have to convert the responsive documents back
to .pst format. The court found that Fed.R.Civ.P. 34 "clearly anticipates that a
defendant may be directed to produce electronic documents in electronic format."
Defendants also argued that it was clearly erroneous to require them to produce
documents in the original .pst format with corresponding bates numbers and
privilege redactions. The court held that the magistrate's order was "reasonable"
because it merely required the defendant to produce the data in the format in which
they were stored in defendants' usual course of business. The court stated that it
understood that "it may be difficult for defendants to incorporate their redactions
and bates numbers into the .pst format, but it is not convinced that the responsive
documents are so replete with privilege redactions that such [a] task would
transcend all reasonableness." Moreover, the defendants had been aware of the document requests for over six months and therefore could not argue that the
court's orders caused inconvenience to them in having to re-convert the data.

>Plus,
>the msg file was full of garbage text, where the rtf was an exact
>replica of the original message.

Interesting as I've not seen that happen yet

> I vote for rtf format when saving
>email outside of the messaging program, and not having an EDMS or ERMS
>to "store" it.

But the RTF file does not metadata associated with the email message. I compared a msg and rtf file. The msg file properties box contains information different from that in contained the properties box of the RTF file. A critical piece missing from the rtf file format is the message id which can be found in the msg file.


--
Peter A. Kurilecz CRM, CA
Richmond, Va
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