[F3nd0]

The main problem I always encountered when sending plan-text e-mails was quote formatting. The 72-character limit works well enough for my own reply, but when the quoted replies already consist of 72-character lines, adding several levels of indentation can break those up and mess up the formatting, since the client doesn’t extend the character limit for the quoted parts, resulting in something like this:

> > > Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do

eiusmod

> > > tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua.

Leaving it like that annoys me, while fixing it by hand gets tedious very fast. I suppose some clients might know how to handle this automatically, but I’ve never had the fortune of using one. (And frankly, plain-text formatting is not among my most important criteria when choosing an e-mail client.)

As many gotchas as HTML e-mail might have in practice, I find the basic idea of giving messages semantic structure make a whole lot of sense. And as for top posting, I understand the criticism, but I find it very suitable for straightforward, back-and-forth exchanges, which comprise a decent part of my e-mail communication. So overall, I can’t say I’m entirely sold on plain-text e-mail.

[Avamander]

This is kinda why "format=flowed" exists, if things fit on the screen, even deeply nested quotes remain readable if there's enough space. And vice versa, people on their phones can still read the text, albeit still to the extent that things can fit. No weird hard wrapping or stray words that could've fit at least.

[layer8]

With terminal-based email programs, you can usually configure your favorite editor for email authoring. And Vim, for example, comes with support for handling email quotes appropriately when using the (paragraph) text formatting commands like gq [0].

[0] https://vimhelp.org/change.txt.html#formatting