I had the same reaction and at the bottom it goes more into details of the reasoning why plaintext is better. I, however disagree on pretty much all the points.
Yes, but some of the rationale is up to dispute, or simply out dated. For example, there is not an email client these days that do not render rich text/HTML. Those who do not, will convert it to plain text. Nothing to lose.
Besides making phishing easier (by disguising links, unless you hover over them), what exactly does HTML add?
Most people simply bang out a bunch of text without any formatting: what does wrapping HTML around that add? I have yet to see a layman someone add useful typographic flourishes to any business communications. Any "advanced" formatting has always come from marketers.
People use bold and italics, section headers, inline images, tables, text highlighting. The list goes on. Is it really that hard to wrap your head around the fact that formatting is useful for communication?
Not in my experience. They hit reply, type something at the top with whatever the defaults are, and hit send.
> Is it really that hard to wrap your head around the fact that formatting is useful for communication?
I have all of Edward Tufte's books, as well Bringhurst's Typographic Style, and Chicago: I am aware of the usefulness of typography. I simply have not seen it in my day-to-day e-mails at work or in personal life (except for marketing spams).
I see useful text formatting every day in the emails I send and receive. A reasonable person would accept that other people’s use cases and preferences are valid instead of writing haughty diatribes about what the platonic ideal of email should look like.
I accept that other people's use cases and preferences differ.
But given the carnage that HTML e-mail being the normal has caused in phishing and other privacy invading manners, I question whether the benefits of those use cases and preferences out-weight the detriments of the practice. Just ask John Podesta:
> SecureWorks concluded Fancy Bear had sent Podesta an email on March 19, 2016, that had the appearance of a Google security alert, but actually contained a misleading link—a strategy known as spear-phishing. (This tactic has also been used by hackers to break into the accounts of other notable persons, such as Colin Powell). The link[10]—which used the URL shortening service Bitly—brought Podesta to a fake log-in page where he entered his Gmail credentials.[1][9][11][12] The email was initially sent to the IT department as it was suspected of being a fake but was described as "legitimate" in an e-mail sent by a department employee, who later said he meant to write "illegitimate".[13][14][15]
HTML emails are mainly used for marketing - that is, emails you probably don't want to see in the first place. The few advantages they offer for end-users, such as links, inline images, and bold or italic text, aren't worth the trade-off.
The idea that marketing emails = "you don't want them" is fairly popular in some crowds, but it's contradicted by the tremendous business success of using marketing emails. The reality is that most people want and use marketing emails.
For example, I'm signed up for marketing emails from several airlines and these routinely save me money when booking vacations. Cheap airline tickets are a limited resource, so real-time notification of new availability has financial value to me.
Same with end-of-season sales for clothing I like. One company gives email recipients 1-2 days to shop before the sale is posted publicly on the website and social media.
It also ignores the tremendous popularity of email newsletters, which employ HTML formatting to improve the user experience, exactly the same way content websites do. In fact HTML email newsletters are often better than websites, because email clients don't execute javascript. The advertising is far less intrusive.
but it's contradicted by the tremendous business success of using marketing emails
I know advertising is effective, it IS manipulating me. That's WHY I don't want it. "I don't want them" is not contradicted by the success of marketing, it's reinforced by the success of marketing.
Does it matter? The default is HTML, the majority of mail is HTML (or atleast multipart). So why does it matter if GMail defaults to what the majority is doing? Everyone (99.9999% of people) can receive and send HTML, so just do that, it's the informal standard for mail now.
It's great that you think that it matters but I don't think that what you think that it matters matters in practise, really, the world is HTML email now.
The people you are interacting are not sending HTML email on purpose, but simply by accident because of details. I would hazard to guess that if the default was changed that they would not noticed.
Given all the communications that you receive, how often have typographic 'flourishes' been added in a useful way that would need mark up more advanced that ASCII/Unicode?
Given the following (from the article):
* HTML as a vector for phishing
* Privacy invasion and tracking
* Mail client vulnerabilities
* HTML emails are less accessible
What exactly does adding mark up give you on a day-to-day basis over a text/plain Content-Type?