There is a large disconnect between people that use/default HTML on in their mail clients, and people that don't.

Additionally, as always, people take it as an attack against themselves when you threaten an action they do often and like doing.

For my (probably our?) part, I prefer text email to a large degree. I do enjoy the ability to view in HTML a few select correspondences I get, but they could just as easily be links to a webpage. In a similar vein, I prefer bottom posting or inline replies for anything beyond a simple response, and trimming unused portions from large quoted sections.

People that reply with color coded text to denote who's speaking cause me a unique type of pain, and I reserve a unique type of hatred for them.

That said, there are probably others that I annoy with my style of correspondence.

> People that reply with color coded text to denote who's speaking cause me a unique type of pain

Not all of us do it on purpose, sometimes it's Outlook helpfully changing our text color to blue after we've copy/pasted from some text from a correspondent. I usually notice this right after I send. Sometimes if someone has a name that's unusual to me, you can tell I had to copy/paste it because it's blue and the rest is black. Always love that one.

I think he's referring to people who give no indications for who is being quoted/if the text is their response, /except/ different colors. Its pretty hard to do this without noticing - if you aren't seeing different colors, you should be adding (Tom) or whatever to mark who said what.

A solution to this seems to be to set the default composition to plain text, which may or may not have other negative consequences depending on your usage. At least that's a solution in Thunderbird, I have no idea if Outlook handles this well (or at all), and any caveats it may have. I imagine it does handle it, Outlook has historically been pretty feature heavy and I know people would have asked for this.

Sorry—I was reading into it as an analogy outside the context of e-mail: I initially interpreted it as a slight on the entire HTML technology. Making more sense now, sorry for the confusion!

I see and I understand. Not to worry. It looked lime some weird misunderstanding since the beginning.