[jeroenhd]

I think this is, aside from the security concerns, why many chat applications, forums and tools like Github/Gitlab have switched to standards like Markdown for text formatting.

I can see the value in linking, embedding images, highlighting through bold and italic text, and underlining. Even code can be useful inside an email. Markdown or a similar language would serve most people very well, much better than HTML. Non-automated and fully automated emails can do with a strong simplification.

Of course, marketing companies will always prefer full HTML because it allows for making their spam more gaudy and for making their emails follow their brand, usually through terrible abuse of tables and CSS that in the end only make emails unreadable on mobile, with dark mode enabled, or massively confuse screen readers.

[inetknght]

If emails were written and parsed as markdown, I might (!) change my opinion about it. But HTML is vastly too feature-rich to be sane. I think showing images inline (such as in Github-flavored Markdown) is still too feature-rich. But lists, tables, monospaced blocks, italic, bold ... these are fine. Embedded images aren't conducive to being parsed by a script.

[jeroenhd]

Inline images are very useful for diagrams, sharing screenshots and more. I can do without the stupid company logo underneath every email, but I'd much rather have to put up with those than be unable to use them. The resources need to be small enough to embed inside the email, though, and external resources should be made aa difficult as possible (always hidden by default, per rfc, with at least two clicks before they're displayed).

My perfect world email markdown will probably be different from yours. For productivity, anything more than slightly stylised text is just unnecessary, but in practice, most email isn't used for productivity anymore. Instant messaging has replaced email as a means of conversation in all workspaces I know.