Thoughts on Writing Emails Using Markdown

Benny Kjær Nielsen:

Essentially, I would like the visual appearance of an email to be under the control of the recipient and not the sender. The typical workaround when viewing emails is to configure the email client to ignore the HTML body part of a message when possible (we’ll get back to how that works further below). In MailMate, you can do it by enabling the “Prefer Plain Text” option in the “Preferences ▸ Viewer” pane.

The problem, for me, with preferring plain text for both composing and viewing is that I do like rich text formatting as long as it is related to the semantics of the message. For example, when using emphasized words, bullet lists, tables, or verbatim text (code) with a non-proportional font. A nicely emphasized word does look better and is easier to read than the traditional starred *word*.