The people in my office love HTML mail. They do not use public mailing
lists. It may be inconvenient for technocrats, but HTML is popular.
'technocrats' have nothing to do with it.
There are lots of data formats that work well in limited environments.
MIME allows consenting adults to happily exchange mail in a wide
variety of limited use formats, including MS Word, Powerpoint, RTF,
PDF, and even HTML - and the ability to do this is popular. But what
is acceptable between consenting adults is not necessarily acceptable
in public.
HTML might become acceptable eventually - once 99% of user agents
can display it effectively, and without creating security or privacy
risks for those who read it. Until that time, recipients are quite
justified in rejecting it, and they don't need to be technocrats to
do so. Sending garbage to someone else's screen is simply rude.
Keith
p.s. I have used mh for many years and I haven't found anything more
effective for what I need to do. Since mh's MIME support is pretty
primitive, I've been writing new versions of some of the mh commands.
I wrote a version of the 'show' command that handles MIME fairly
well and which decodes and displays most HTML constructs. What
I've found is that for the most part, the only messages which actually
make use of HTML (as opposed to sending HTML which displays identicallly
to the text/plain portion) are spam.
so a user agent that refuses to display HTML (detects it and refuses
to display it, rather than displaying garbage) actually makes a fairly
effective spam filter.