I'm good with attachment when you need to send me a real document, but if the email text itself ends up being multi-megabyte blob because you absolutely must have your name in the signature in blue and italic, then I tend to frown upon this. Over decades of my work I probably sent thousands of emails, yet very rarely if ever I needed HTML capabilities, and pretty much never ones that go beyond very basic Markup formatting.

Email attachments are defined through MIME and don't depend at all on HTML being available as a Content-Type. We could well have had another format and attachments together.

Yea! `text/rtf` FTW!

I'm confused. How is HTML needed to attach a file (or to open the attachment)?

MIME is needed, and with MIME, HTML is basically right there, so people are going to use it.

HTML is not needed for attachments to work. If the government for example, banned all use of HTML in emails, people could still attach (non-HTML) files to emails the same way they do now. Therefore the comment I replied to, a defense of HTML in emails, is a bogus argument.

The point is that attachments are needed to make HTML work. If you have attachments, you have HTML emails.

> The point is that attachments are needed to make HTML work.

They are not.

MIME headers are helpful for telling MUAs what the content (type and/or disposition) of a message is, but there's nothing from stoping mail clients from just putting "raw" HTML in the body of an e-mail message without MIME.

Yes, obviously you could just email HTML before MIME existed. That's not the point of the discussion at hand.

This is bad logic, and so is your comment upthread, IMHO.

"I think HTML sucks" is a bogus argument.

Why not HTML? At least it isn't RTF or some wonky SGML evolutionary dead-end.

A browser engine is necessary to render an HTML email, and browser engines have large attack surfaces -- and in general they are very complicated, which makes them difficult to reason about.

Also, normies don't write HTML, but rather they depend on services (like Gmail) offered by corporations to transform their composition into HTML, which gives the corporations and avenue to track me or to try to persuade or influence me unless I want to respond by instructing my normie friend never to send me email.

In general, HTML email brings the privacy and security problems of the web to email.

Also, HTML makes email much harder to archive because an HTML document's legibility often depends on references (embedded in the HTML document) to files on the internet, and these references to online files tend to rot.

Some of us are tired of web tech spreading its tentacles everywhere, especially to technologies like email that were already useful and mature before web tech started spreading to them.

Can still do plain text with attachments... unless you expect that companies would move to emailing you HTML files of their message?

I think that hodge podge (OneDrive, Google drive, Dropbox, etc) is what most people already use. "Simple file attachments" are an oxymoron these days--size/extension restrictions, spam scores, not to mention the hell of iterating over email.

Depends on your use case. Sometimes I want to send a document and not have the receiver change it at their whims. E.g. quotes for jobs. Simple attachments are great for that. Also I find some people who aren't good with tech find attachments much easier to deal with. If I send a an attachment I am 100% confident the other person can open it. No so for sharing links etc.