[kevincox]

Yeah, the occasional bold word, inline link, heading or even the occasional image can make a message much more readable. If you don't like bold words your client can ignore that tag.

I think this is partly an over-reaction to some senders that go way overboard with bright colours a hundred images and complex layout that doesn't render right on your screen size. But just because a capability can be used poorly doesn't mean that it can't be used well.

I can also understand that some people choose to prefer the text version of messages because it is so common to "abuse" HTML. And for those people I even include a text fallback in case their client doesn't have the ability to do that.

[pomatic]

I'm sure markdown email has been done? But just didn't gain traction?

[colonial]

GNOME Evolution supports Markdown natively (I believe either raw or rendered to HTML on send; I use the latter.)

[jaffa2]

Mailmate on macos solves this very nicely. As a bonus my html mails have never looked better and i get the bonus of writing in text using markdown . Currently evaluating it.

[Avamander]

There's no The Markdown that's standardised (or safe enough), that it could be implemented like that unfortunately.

[xigoi]

Thank you. I hate when people say “Markdown” as if it was a single language and not a collective term for 100+ kinda similar languages.

[DavideNL]

For macOS check MailMate : https://freron.com/