[ryan_brunner]

You could apply the same argument to webpages. I think HTML e-mail is a complete mess right now, but allowing some degree of e-mail styling does go a long way in helping users understand what the e-mail is trying to convey.

Something as simple as laying out tabluar data in a table is extremely hard to pull off effectively with a plain-text e-mail.

[duck]

Exactly. For my Hacker Newsletter project I have a real hard time putting in all the links (one to the article, one to the comments) in text mode, but HTML makes this easy for users to scan and use.