It's the reality of the composition of e-mail today. Close to 100% of e-mails transmitted are in either HTML or that God-awful Base64 MS- TNEF/rich text format.
Yours might be but the majority of emails I receive are plain text.
But even if all e-mail were forced to be plain text, it would make almost no difference in bandwidth usage.
I love that people scream on the Fedora Core list about the bandwidth "wasted" by e-mail (15 megs/month) but no one seems to remember that the errata for FC3 is up to 2.6 GIGABYTES for i386 alone.
The first time someone fires up 'yum update,' they will find that their e-mail traffic is just a drop in the bandwidth bucket. The argument about HTML mail taking up too much space/bandwidth just don't hold up any more. Relative to web browsing and software updates, e-mail is inconsequential.
When I used to be on the wrong end of a slow, expensive link, I wouldn't have dreamed of firing up "yum update". I'd be very selective about the updates I downloaded and would download and install them manually. For a "full set", I'd try to get a friend to burn a CD for me. Or I could download them at my leisure during off peak hours at the weekend.
Now if HTML mail was the norm, the size of my mailbox would roughly double. Not a big difference really, you'd think, but that means twice as long to download my mail whenever I retrieve it, and that's not going to wait until the weekend. On the other hand, if people were to observe time-honoured netiquette and post in plain text with properly-trimmed posts, everyone would be happy and the volume of mail would go down, not only because of elimination of HTML markup but because there would be no flamewars about it either.
I'm not advocating being rude to people (that IMHO is worse than lack of netiquette), but gently pushing them in a direction that achieves the best result *for everyone* in addition to (not instead of) answering their questions (as you yourself did only 2.5 hours ago) is I think the best way to go.
Paul.
