But I have to send the same sort of information (albeit shorter) via email on a regular basis.
A lot of alerts, reporting, quotes, code snippets, short documentation or step by step instructions, etc.
I don't just send emails to say "Hey, let's meet at 5". You know the memes with "this could have been an email", it usually is this case.
Just to be clear, most of those rich emails are the automatic/transactional emails.
Yeah, I get it, I unfortunately live in the real world too. I like to keep it plain text whenever possible but it's extremely useful sometimes to have inline screenshots and stuff like that.
I didn't mean to be sarcastic but it's just that to me, philosophically, email is a plaintext technology that had HTML bolted on to it kicking and screaming, and it's always been kind of crap. People like me hate things that are fundamentally ugly and crap even if they are useful. The web was designed for HTML from the start.