You say that like it is a bad thing.
I'm really pleased that email cannot set a style header and has limited ability to have the email deviate greatly in presentation from other email I receive.
I'm really pleased that email cannot set a style header and has limited ability to have the email deviate greatly in presentation from other email I receive.
Just playing devil's advocate here.
Also, I think many people do that with AdBlock, so it's not unheard of to block styling on webpages of dubious origin.
I think it's to do with perceived ownership of the environment in which the information is consumed.
Your website... feel free to style, brand, make pretty or ugly. You can make the experience consistent within your realm.
My inbox... I get to control my workflows, how I consume things, in which order, etc. I choose to make the experience consistent within my realm.
That holds fairly well as a definition for why I prefer chat clients that grant me the ability to make all messages consistent, and that do not allow the sender to dictate terms. It also holds up with things like Netflix, it's their realm they can knock themselves out on their design.
It does seem to be whether the environment it is presented is "yours" or "mine".
You are free to set your client to ignore styling on the content, but the content should be stylable for everyone else that wants it to look good.
If you want to show your styles to Gmail users and you have to inline your CSS in every HTML tags you want to alter, which is very ugly and made the email size unneeded large.