There are plenty of use cases for <li>/<h1>/<em> in emails, and with some nice default user styles they can give everyone a pleasant experience.
Sadly, CSS is often applied and the HTML people write is often broken.
I caved in and replaced mutt with Thunderbird personally. Not only for properly displaying HTML, but it was a big reason. Thunderbird sucks massively for composing plain text emails though, and no simple way to integrate an external editor...
Have you considered emacs with notmuch and the Gnus renderer? It displays most HTML emails well, and when it doesn’t then a browser is just a quick ‘. b’ away. And of course there’s no need to integrate an external editor, because it’s integrated within the editor!
As a plus, it is simply amazing how quickly one can search local email.
Please don't say "there shouldn't be formatted text in email." That's not a reasonable position.
RFC 1896 specifies text/enriched: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1896
And of course nowadays there is Markdown, which basically codifies a lot of earlier plain-text formatting conventions.
> Please don't say "there shouldn't be formatted text in email." That's not a reasonable position.
I don’t know about that, really. We got by fine with plain text messages for decades, and the formatting conventions were good enough to convey meaning and nuance.
Once email was in wide use by the general public, easy formatting was inevitable. HTML was everywhere, and so was the path of least resistance.
I thought it awful at the time, but "at the time" was literally more than two decades ago. HTML email is fine. MOST mail I get, professionally, has some formatting in it now. MOST mail I send probably does, too, to increase what a mentor of mine used to call "scan value."
Could I put all that in a Word doc and email THAT instead? Sure. But that would be a huge pain in the ass.
I don’t think that HTML emails are really an improvement: full-fledged HTML engines bring in too many opportunities for exploits and privacy loss. They definitely add capability, but at too high a cost IMHO.
In general, I think that our industry would benefit from asking ‘can we?’ less and instead asking ‘ought we?’ more.
However, my thread is more "can we do it differently?" instead of "maybe we shouldn't do it at all"
I agree, HTML isn't right for email.
Some different approach, possibly a markdown variant, with decent style support (basic css like background colours, fonts, like markdown themes in a code editor), why not explore that.
There's no reason emails need to be plain. RTF is a horrible format, markdown is much more prevalent and easy to make a simple UI formatter that obeys the standard for non technical users.