It at least implies a certain lack of technical expertise on the part of organizations that send such HTML only emails. The same for when they put completely unformated garbage in the text part. If W3M can do a better job starting with their HTML email you have to ask yourself why they couldn't of done at least that instead of whatever they did.

> What’s lame is when there is no plaintext alternative.

Or worse yet, when the plaintext alternative version is broken/incomplete.

I regularly receive mail where the plaintext alternative version has templating variable names instead of actual values, where the html version has the values.

Also, systems that send mail where the plaintext alternative version is only something along the lines of “Your email client does not support HTML. Please read this newsletter at” and then a link. But of course, my client can read html too, I just have it set to view the plaintext version by default.

One of these days I will probably just set it to always prefer the html version instead. I use mutt, with elinks taking care of html to plain text conversion. I’ve been running my mail server for years.

But anyways it might soon be time for me to switch to hosted mail. I have a provider in mind.

Sometimes plain text alternative is so bad that one forced to use HTML version anyway. I've tried plain text emails in Atlassian Jira settings - emails it sends are badly formatted and have lots of empty lines, likely they make plaintext version from HTML one with something like `lynx --dump`.

If it was sent personally to you by somebody who knew your preference you might be right, but realistically the number of people who cares or who have any issue with HTML mails is going to be sub 0.1%, so it is almost certainly more a case of don't care, not worth considering.