Enriched text is a formatted text format for email, defined by the IETF in RFC 1896 and associated with the text/enriched MIME type which is defined in RFC 1563.

It is "intended to facilitate the wider interoperation of simple enriched text across a wide variety of hardware and software platforms". As of 2012, enriched text remained almost unknown in email traffic, while HTML email is widely used.^{[citation needed]} Enriched text, or at least the subset of HTML that can be transformed into enriched text, is seen as preferable to full HTML for use with email (mainly because of security considerations).^[1][2]

A predecessor of this MIME type was called text/richtext in RFC 1341 and RFC 1521. Neither should be confused with Rich Text Format (RTF, MIME type text/rtf or application/rtf) which are unrelated specifications, devised by Microsoft.

A single newline in enriched text is treated as a space. Formatting commands are in the same style as SGML and HTML. They must be balanced and nested.

Enriched text is a supported format of Emacs,^[3] Mutt,^[4] Mulberry and Netscape Communicator.