I hate HTML email. I absolutely hate it. Every time I open an email message and see a non-fixed-width font, I simmer with hatred. Most HTML email is junk mail, which is useless enough and takes up too much space, too much bandwidth. But at least advertisements have some kind of justifiable reason for using HTML — images and tables and formatting.

But when people send a regular message with a few lines of text, and then they code the damn thing in HTML (I’m actually restraining myself from using some pretty harsh profanity, here) — the message takes up three or four times as much space as it would have otherwise, and it screws up the reply, so I have to reformat anything I quote and add the > chevron marks manually. And for what? What purpose does it serve to send a message that looks like text, but has none of the economy, efficiency or manageability of text? That doesn’t use any of the features that makes the HTML format justifiable?

HTML email is becoming more and more common. I’m getting more and more pissed off just writing about it. So if you send HTML email, stop. Please. Especially if you send email to me. And read up on a few more reasons why HTML email is evil.