We had this argument where I work (with thousands of consumer and business customers). Some quick A/B testing and surveying indicate that "People have email cl

We had this argument where I work (with thousands of consumer and business customers). Some quick A/B testing and surveying indicate that "People have email clients configured and they know how to use them" is very wrong :) With an actual contact form we had a massive spike in pre-sales requests, with a direct spike in new business. This is especially prevalent for business users, who will often make a sales contact. Anyone with a B2B site that only has a mailto: link is losing out! As to the rest (rich text, etc.) I agree. We built our contact form to push the (plain text) request into a mailbox & send a pleasant information email to the customers address, which accounts for a lot of the points you raise.