He's talking about mailing lists where people submit patches and such, so 90% of the email is text only. And (here I'm guessing) he's talking about replying to, say, a patch email and having it html-fied.

Usually mailing list software, not people, deletes HTML email.

He has a good technical reason for not liking html mail, but the number of people who care about this are vanishingly small and a device maker doesn't really need to care about them. There'll be an app to come along soon I imagine.

It's not the device-maker, it's a fault of the GMail app.

Ironic.

The people who would know and care about this stuff are exactly the kind of people who would have wrote the app: programmers.