>> Then we would have come full circle. A markup language that has been at least inspired if not derived from decade old usenet/mail conventions would be back w

>> Then we would have come full circle. A markup language that has been at least inspired if not derived from decade old usenet/mail conventions would be back where it started from. > Is this a bad thing? Not a bad thing but in this case it seems a little bit pointless as we wouldn't have gained much. It happens a lot that something that is popular now has been there a while ago so you have some old farts saying "but we already had that 20 years ago!" although often there are some crucial changes to how it looked then so that it now has a completely different impact. For example, we are about to get WebAssembly in the browers, essentially a bytecode VM. We had that 20 years ago with Java, although the integration of Java and the browser was not tight enough. Or VR which 20 years ago was quite hyped and then somehow just died down and for all I know the difference to today is only that the graphics was crappier back then. Markdown in the mail client doesn't give you much over what we had 20 years ago. If I enable format-flowed and use a variable-width font, it probably looks quite similar to the rendered Markdown. Oh, one thing I forgot about unstyled HTML pages. Mobile browsers suck a rendering that. >> I know of no mail client that isn't able to handle HTML. > Any text-mode mail client? I mean sure there are some that can interpret basic HTML formatting and translate that to control characters for a sufficiently capable terminal, but modern HTML mail tends to go far beyond that. Basically what formatting a text-mode client can actually handle also happens to be the same formatting that Markdown supports. No images, no fonts, no colors, just paragraphs, links, quotes, and some basic emphasis formatting. Any text-mode mail client will have ways of rendering HTML with the help of external programs. That's not surprising, as they already needed that for things like images or PDFs. Some even let you fire up a browser to read them, some have some basic HTML parsing capabilities but I think most just do let some program convert the HTML to text to display inline as if it were a text/plain section. As you can't rely on scripting being enabled (are there actually any mail client that still have HTML scripting?) the HTML needs to have all the text you want the receiver to read, so converting it to text usually works fine. I can't remember reading any legit HTML mail in the last years where this wasn't the case.