They want the red font more often than they just want the text, and don't get annoyed when their email now is all in red Impact font?
These oft-mentioned mythical users that have opposite expectations from their computer than us are a bit like the Sasquatch. Some say they've seen them, but I still don't believe it. :-)
Hardly sasquatch. It's extremely common where I work. Your experience simply isn't representative of the population.
Also these days clients don't have much of a problem handling things. I don't know exactly when, but at some point I went from not being able to paste excel into an email without it being unusably messy to having it paste nearly perfectly on formatting.
In all seriousness, I've worked for many years for a company that had as a feature to help clients build knowledge bases. Most of it was done by copy/pasting Word documents into a web page.
Keeping formatting was our #1 requested feature and most demanding task.
So yeah, people want that and companies are built on those jot-so-mythical users and their truly-not-mythical money.
These oft-mentioned mythical users that have opposite expectations from their computer than us are a bit like the Sasquatch. Some say they've seen them, but I still don't believe it. :-)