OSNews

You're correct, it is 2007, and in 2007 (2008), there's increasing diversification in the means and modes of sending and receiving e-mail. You have no idea if your recipient's going to be sat in front of a PC on a corporate LAN, or receiving mail on a PDA, smartphone, (or not-so-smartphone—given pretty much every phone released in the past 5 years or so can do e-mail).

The “few extra tags” aren't expensive, if they're marked up properly by hand, but the only people who would even consider doing that are people producing e-mail campaigns rather than ordinary person-to-person messages. The rest of the time, the expense is determined—in general—by a team of people in Redmond, and they're not renowned for spitting out anything that isn't several multiples in size of the plain-text equivalent.

Pictures? Attach them, every mail client in popular usage will render previews anyway. Tables of data? Attach them—then at least they can be manipulated, copied and pasted sanely, and so on.

Yes, HTML e-mail could be fine, were it limited to a smattering of minor embellishments. Just emphasis and tables would cover 99% of the legitimate requirements for it, in fact. But that's not how it works. The vast majority of HTML e-mail sent and received is unmitigated bloated and the world would do well without it; you might use it sanely, but you're in a distinct minority, and if you're smart enough to use HTML e-mail without inducing cancer of the retina, you're smart enough to use alternative mechanisms for achieving the same thing anyway.