[tomjen3]

My email is better when quotes are colored differently, when links are clickable and when tabular data is presented as such.

I define better in the Aristotelian sense - the emails job is to convey information into my brain and my argument is that properly formatted email is better than nonformatted email at this task.

Your email client may already do some, or all of this with plain text in which case it is essentially an (incomplete, partial, non-compatible) markdown render. But why not have a standard for how to render email that works with 99.9% of readers?

Well we do have that, and the standard is HTML. It's ugly if you look at it, but it works and that is better than being theoretical and clean, no? I mean I want to send LaTeX that adapt to the readers screen, or AsciiDoc, but that isn't going to happen.

While we could idealize about dispatching LaTeX content that can dynamically adapt to the recipient's screen size, or fantasize about the use of AsciiDoc, the reality is that such alternatives are not broadly supported and hence are currently unfeasible.

I do agree with you about blocking external images by default.