Not in my experience. They hit reply, type something at the top with whatever the defaults are, and hit send.
> Is it really that hard to wrap your head around the fact that formatting is useful for communication?
I have all of Edward Tufte's books, as well Bringhurst's Typographic Style, and Chicago: I am aware of the usefulness of typography. I simply have not seen it in my day-to-day e-mails at work or in personal life (except for marketing spams).
But given the carnage that HTML e-mail being the normal has caused in phishing and other privacy invading manners, I question whether the benefits of those use cases and preferences out-weight the detriments of the practice. Just ask John Podesta:
> SecureWorks concluded Fancy Bear had sent Podesta an email on March 19, 2016, that had the appearance of a Google security alert, but actually contained a misleading link—a strategy known as spear-phishing. (This tactic has also been used by hackers to break into the accounts of other notable persons, such as Colin Powell). The link[10]—which used the URL shortening service Bitly—brought Podesta to a fake log-in page where he entered his Gmail credentials.[1][9][11][12] The email was initially sent to the IT department as it was suspected of being a fake but was described as "legitimate" in an e-mail sent by a department employee, who later said he meant to write "illegitimate".[13][14][15]
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Podesta_emails
Or countless others who have been phished.
> <html><head>
> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1">
> <meta http-equiv="Refresh" content="0; URL=https://c.na39.content.force.com/servlet/servlet.EmailAttach... [...] ">
> </head><body>
> <div>Attachment not opening? Click this link: <a href="https://c.na39.content.force.com/servlet/servlet.EmailAttach... [...] ">ColorAnalysisWithOMA300.pdf</a>
> </div></html>
From a post made today:
Besides making phishing easier (by disguising links, unless you hover over them), what exactly does HTML add?
Most people simply bang out a bunch of text without any formatting: what does wrapping HTML around that add? I have yet to see a layman someone add useful typographic flourishes to any business communications. Any "advanced" formatting has always come from marketers.