Agreed. Every time I've tried to switch to using plain text I always encountered cases where additional formatting made my message easier to read and understand.
I'd be perfectly happy with Markdown or likely RFC 1896 as someone else mentioned.
Formatted email is especially difficult for blind users, whether they are using a screen reader or a Braille display.
Formatting can't be read aloud via text-to-speech if a sighted person is using it on a smartwatch or similar.
Formatting does not survive automatic translation. I live in a country where I do not speak the local language and I rely very heavily on machine translation; in fact in the last 5min I have just paid my gas bill using Google Translate to understand the email I was sent, and then again to navigate the gas supplier's website.
Formatting does not display in on-screen notification messages, and it may not survive being forwarded, read in certain clients, etc.
If you find you are relying on it, then you should improve your writing skills, because you are unwittingly excluding people and some will receive damaged versions of your emails which they can't understand correctly.
Is this universally true? I'm not an accessibility expert but from working on a couple 508 projects it seems that formatting such as headings improves accessibility and makes navigation easier.
> If you find you are relying on it, then you should improve your writing skills
Some of the content I email includes screenshots of issues, photographs from studies, iconography, and data visualizations. Beyond ensuring that I include accompanying/alternate text I accept that these will not be accessible.
Other content includes hierarchical lists and snippets of tabular data. While these can be creatively emulated using plain text I find that people doing so typically resort to a jarring sort of ASCII-art approach that ends up being even less accessible than just using the proper semantic tags or markdown.
More broadly I find it disappointing that we ended up in this situation where technical constraints dictate what is good writing. Italics has been part of writing for hundreds of years and now it's relegated to "markup" because of decisions some computer engineers made sixty years ago. Can you imagine if the ASCII standard had stuck with the initial all-caps specification and relegated lowercase letters to be markup? Would we now be arguing that people who don't write in all caps "should improve [their] writing skills"?
Personally I prefer structured text to either plain or formatted text. Formats like markdown aren't perfect but they basically provide what I need so it's disappointing that email clients force us to choose between the extremes of plain text and HTML.
My email app _Mailtemi_ actually does HTML -> Markdown.
Still curious, is it worth going this direction?
I'm using Markdown for email preview, local search, etc.
In the future I think about experimenting with voice mail.
Something like "Read all important emails", which will skip all marketing, updates, or forums.
Also I have an experimental feature email to be viewed always in Markdown.
