Long before Outlook 2007's indexed search and contact manager, I had Eudora -- probably the first standalone email client I ever used apart from Outlook itself and CompuServe's unbelivably evil Windows client application. I eventually outgrew Eudora (much to my chagrin), but one of the things that stayed with me as a matter of habit was the use of plaintext for email.
To this day, I'm still a plaintext snob when it comes to email, and it's one of those decisions I plan to stick with as long as it is humanly possible. Many of the reasons I could quote are probably tiresomely familiar to you by now:
- Email was never meant to become a carrier for rich text and graphics (and spyware, and ads, and...)
- The less there is in any given email, the better.
- HTML is more of an eyesore for some people (like myself) than a prettifier.
- If you think the riot of ">" marks that you get from a multi-response email is bad, wait till you see how it looks in HTML -- where each respondent can potentially have a different font, quote delineator, text color, and so on.
The only concession I've made away from this stance is to use UTF-8 as my standard text encoding rather than ASCII. This is mostly because I do find that I have to rely on some characters that aren't available in ASCII (for instance, when corresponding with people in non-English character sets), but other than that it's straight 8-bit for me.
In a weird way, this is part of why I've not been as aggravated by the rush to XML as many other people have (as a general data-storage format). It may not be the prettiest thing in the world, but it's a heck of a lot less thorny at bottom than anything in a binary format, and it can be conquered with any number of free editing tools out there.
I suspect, under it all, there's a high degree of nostalgia at work. 8-bit text (and even UTF-8) is about as clean and uncluttered as you're likely to get in this world.
(While I'm at it, I should plug a tool that I've been using as my plaintext editor of choice: Notepad2. It supports both ASCII and UTF-8 interchangeably, and has a slew of little features that make it just right for casual editing of text files.)
Email is about communication. Communication is enhanced by color, different fonts, italics, bold, graphics...
Since we can use these properties to enhance our email communication we should. It allows us to better communicate with each other.
Plaintext email messages are often ugly and difficult to read. This is another compelling reason to use HTML.
[I agree, up to a point. I still feel that a lot of what can be said in email can be said without needing to rely on those things -- and unfortunately, there's no way to simply allow those basic rudiments of HTML without also allowing every other eyesore under the sun.--ed.]