One interesting anecdote about plain text not being the default in most popular email clients come from my own PublicEmails.com email-to-blog-post project. Peop

One interesting anecdote about plain text not being the default in most popular email clients come from my own PublicEmails.com email-to-blog-post project. People would experiment with it and the allowed list of HTML tags for formatting (https://publicemails.com/blog/display/772/37f6f81d9a https://publicemails.com/blog/display/772/37f6f81d9a) but would get confused when the tags would render verbatim instead of being processed correctly. They didn't realize they were in HTML mode by default in most email clients like Gmail, and that they would have to manually switch back to plain text if they wanted to use HTML tags. I ended up adding a question to the FAQ to address this issue specifically, though people still get confused from time to time. There is a touch of irony about it - to get HTML tags to work, you have to be in plain text, not HTML mode. Once you're in HTML mode all that's needed for formatting is the client's own formatting controls.