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Fair. I like that minimal formatting there anyway.

But often I have to communicate via email, report on complex issues, etc. It is nice to have some headings, tables, images in there.

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Agreed. As much as I like plain text email personally, having inline images etc. is really helpful sometimes.

The key is sometimes. Plain text by default, rich text when required.

Software that would strip all html out of emails for security would be handy

Before MIME was common, people used to insert uuencoded data within the email message. IIRC, certain email clients would display the decoded content inline with the surrounding text.

Why not use MS Word or some other tool designed for writing documents then ?

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