For all my personal writing (which includes footnotes, blockquotes with attribution, etc) I have found that nothing beats a text editor and some form of structured text. For me, I use asciidoc, which conveniently converts to docbook, and from there to all sorts of other formats.

Abiword is okay, but my past experience is that it has a difficult time with large rtf files -- which is why I don't use it. I should see how openoffice performs under the chroot with importing large files.

I do agree that a document viewer utility for reviewing (but not necessarily editing) different formatted attachments in email would be useful.