Well, just to give an alternative opinion...

Quoted:
----------------------
Sending E-mail in formats other than "Plain/Text" is a badly conceived idea,
in my humble opinion - doing so contradicts all the internet conventions and
standards which established the universal accessibility of this miraculous
medium in the first place.
----------------------

Plain text email dates from the days when teletypes were used as the
communications medium of choice.  i.e. 1970 or so.  Teletypes usually could
only print about 93 characters, which fit American English fine, but didn't
easily fit into a programming "word" size (8-bits at that time for most
things).  Thus 128 character ascii was born, using 7-bits, which allowed all
of the American English characters with some room left over for things like
new lines, EOT, and BEL.

Those early versions of Unix which formed the backbone of the Internet were
developed and deployed in places which had no money for new-fangled
terminals.  They used 7-bit character sets because that's what worked in
their environment, not because it was the best choice.  Thus, much of what
you see in email is not the best technological choice, but just people
blindly following the standards set down in a by-gone era, based on economic
choices which are no longer valid.

Universally accessible?  Not really -- tell that to someone in the Far East
or Middle East.  They use character sets which require something more than
plain text.  Anyone who has done i18n programming realizes that our 7-bit
heritage is very inadequate once you get beyond our  borders.  7-bit
character sets came from USA programming -- because we had these darned
teletypes originally, and got used to them, and we could afford to be lazy.

In MY humble opinion, Plain/Text has had its day, and is long due to be
relegated to the history books.  You may quibble about the pro's and con's
of HTML vs RTF vs whatever, but the point of email is communications.  And
there are better ways to communicate than via plain text.

Feel free to flame away.

--
Chris Anderson
Director, Technical Support
Unify Corporation