For the vast majority of people html formatting is better and more efficient for their communication needs. Bold and highlighted text, section headers, tables and inline images are all very very standard and useful things to have in emails. These are not niche use cases.
I have never seen an email with a table in it, HTML or not.
Inline images are not useful, just attach them. Leave your giant signature with your company logo at the door.
What's left is section headers and bold text. Use asterisks for emphasis and # for section headers and you can communicate quite effectively. We seem to manage pretty well here on Hacker News without most of these features, wouldn't you say?
I often use inline images in emails, for the same reason I put images inline in other writing. I recently wrote an email summarizing some debugging I had done so someone else could pick it up. It looked like:
text describing steps
image of graph
link to graph source
more text
another graph
link to graph source
etc
We're all using email clients that display messages like this well, and it makes communicating complex ideas much faster.
I'd give up HTML email if I could still have format=flowed and inline images, but that's not what's on offer.
I routinely insert org-mode tables into emails I send at work (now that I think about it, that's a little funny, given that I'm consistently pro-HTML-email in these threads).
It was not. The HN page contains html. Notice how the comments are in a different font and color from the metadata above each comment? Notice how that improves readability?
Downvoted comments are less readable due to decreased contrast (though I assume that's intentional so people well skip over them instead of responding).
