[alkonaut]

Hard no.

Use whatever format and formatting your recipient wants. What they want is just a function of what client they use. If you are in an Outlook organization then just do whatever outlook does.

If you send to an external recipient you’ll need to guess, but if the recipient is at a medium to large corporation, chances are it’s Outlook there too.

And it’s not that people with html clients can’t read plaintext. It’s that it just looks odd to the recipient.

Once every 10000 emails I send something to one of the ”technical communities” mentioned. I can switch to plaintext then, or bottom/inline reply etc - because they expect or require it. But switching outright because a tiny group of niche techies find it a good idea? No, sorry. Email was eaten by gmail and Outlook and the only chance to change anything would be if their defaults changed (which isn’t happening).

[Rotundo]

I disagree with you vehemently.

The recipient will get what I deem to be appropriate. I will not, ever, stoop to the lowest common denominator of giving in to the tyranny of Outlook and its ilk.

I'm sending text, not a complete website to the recipient.

[rsync]

Both you, and your parent, should consider changing your view in favor of Postel's law:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robustness_principle

"... be conservative in what you send, be liberal in what you accept ..."

[alkonaut]

I don’t see how that applies to be honest. The default has changed to html a long time ago and that’s what people expect.

What would be great would be if clients detected when I send an email with only text and just chose to format it as plaintext then BUT importantly, that th e reverse happens in the reading client: it formats it the same regardless, so my text email doesn’t look strange. Needs to render with the same font etc.

it almost never happens that I send a plain text email though since my org like so many prescribes the use of an image as signature. Not to mention that 9 emails out of 10 contains other images anyway.

[Fogest]

Yeah, I have to agree with this strongly. I worked at a University before and it was only the super old employees still using plain text email clients, everyone else was using Outlook. Most of the reason for not switching was simply due to a refusal to adapt and learn something new. Especially since there are more modern clients that also feature hotkeys/shortcuts that still allow you to do things quickly.

The people who refused to adapt to newer technology also caused slowdowns in other parts of the workplace as anything new that would be implemented in any site/service had to also try to account for people who wanted to do things old ways, instead of the faster new ways. Because they had 100 scripts they'd use to make the old way not suck as much and viewed that as better than learning the new way.

Realistically nobody is 100% productive, and the slight seconds that may be lost using a GUI based email client over something plaintext is insignificant.

[zzo38computer]

There are other disadvantages of the working of many modern software programs though, including undesirable features, and you might not want to use the sender's formatting, and missing stuff, and stuff that doesn't work as well. Shortcut keys is not the only issue.

[F3nd0]

On the other hand, it's perfectly reasonable not to give up the choice that you prefer and consider superior in many ways, just because ‘e-mail was eaten by Gmail and Outlook’. In fact, I personally feel great aversion to those two services and strongly dislike the idea of letting them dictate the way I use an open standard. If that was my main reason for ever using HTML e-mail (which, thankfully, it's not), I'd really rather just send plain text and have it look odd to the recipient.

[mr_mitm]

Well, I as a recipient want plain text.

[alkonaut]

You’ll need to hope I can guess it. But in most orgs this isn’t a problem. My guess is nearly all email is within an organization where no one chooses mail programs.

If you send a plain text email you’ll likely get one in response. But the chance you’d get an initial email as plain text is pretty slim. There is no way it somehow becomes the default except in situations where it’s clearly prescribed up front.