[krsdcbl]

I believe the truth lies somewhere in the middle. Personally I very much share your purist view here, BUT i also find barely formatted plain text marketing emails highly suspicious and tend to filter them out as scam subconsciously.

Don't overload your communication, that is right. But also don't neglect your design and branding.

It's easy to think plain text is better when coming from a technical background with probably well maintained inbox, but your average customer has likely an inbox overflowing with marketing stuff already and will need visual hooks, proper presentation and coherence in appearance to decide if something is trustworthy and worth being read.

[Seirdy]

Plain text or unformatted email, in my experience, is more likely to have come from an actual person who genuinely wants to send me something. Heavily formatted emails optimized for user manipulation ("engagement") are typically sent by marketing departments who want to sell me something and can be safely discarded and added to my killfile.

I typically recommend all my friends to do the same, and many of them already do. How do you think most people react when they see a banner saying "Would you like to load remote images? [yes] [no]"?