Ever receive an email in some weird format you can't understand? then download the program that is supposed to let you read the message, install it, run the program, go through the setup stages, enter confirmation codes, if you are stuck with windows, you might then have to restart your computer open up your email client (again) click the message and.. if you're lucky see whatever it was they sent you, only to discover it was an office joke or something you really didn't need to go through all that trouble over?
If you're like me, you've learned to just delete such emails. In fact, spam tools will sometimes look for the so called "html formatted emails" and mark them with a higher spam score.
In short..
Email is for plain text.
There is a temptation people have, they want to send fancy-formatted email messages with icons, fonts and graphics. I think this temptation is derived not from what the person on the other end wants, but rather, people send HTML or MS-Word files through email as a means of showing off.
HTML email poses a number of problems.
When you receive an email message, formatted in HTML from say.. a spammer, there is a good chance they've inserted an image in there, that image is then used to tell them "a human opened this email, therefore this is a real mail box and I should keep spamming.
With plain-text, you can't hide a URL as easily as you can with HTML. Crooks use this to give you a URL that might look like something from wells fargo, but, the real link points to some off-shore host, collecting your banking information.
Would your reader really appreciate all that extra junk that goes along with a formatted email? especially if they knew it took more space?
Just because an email message may look fancy and pretty to you doesn't mean it will look the same to the person on the other end.
They might not even be able to display it.
I've known a few sysadmins who install tight firewalls, systems designed to weed out any email that is potentially harmful.
If you want your email to actually get there in a usable format, you should stick to using plain text. Email systems are an overly fangled, convoluted mess of spaghetti code as it is. Why take chances?
Plain text suffers from none of these problems, you can trust it. You can't send executable content in a "plain text email" and you run no risk of getting a virus. Plain text may seem boring, but it is the standard and it works with nearly every single email program in existence since, oh, the 70's or so!
Lets do our part to stomp out complex emails, next time someone sends me an HTML (or worse.. MS-Word) email message,
Apparently some people forget that email is supposed to be about communication, in that light, I think I'll respond with a nice nroff document or maybe something in postscript.
Better still.. I'll just delete it.