Do yourself (and to other e-mail users in the hacker community) some good and use something like Mutt or Gnus. Sth. like Thunderbird is not worth the hassle if you can edit a configuration file and read a man page (most folk here, I'd guess), and who can't is using Gmail and/or the app on their phones anyways.
IIRC you can use the browser to view them, i.e. a keystroke opens it in the browser. In Gnus I hit "K H" for that. Emacs also has SHR, a renderer for HTML, but it doesn't do all that good with complex documents.
Why do so many geeks insist that markup is good for web documents but not for e-mail?
E-mails can benefit from headings, bulleted lists and tables just as much as a web page. It's all about communicating information in human-digestable format.
OR PERHAPS ALL EMAIL SHOULD BE SENT TELEGRAM STYLE WITHOUT PUNCTUATION SINCE THAT IS JUST A DISTRACTION STOP ALSO ONLY IN ASCII CAPS STOP
Am also a ham, so not completely opposed to increased take-up of CW. Particularly in a global HF mesh network.
I'm not actually opposed to markup at all, but you know exactly the kind of over-designed barf I'm talking about being happy not receiving. I can always open an email from a tmp file in the browser (by hitting <v> then <enter> in mutt) but in more than 9/10 cases that just isn't necessary. W3m renders an approximation of the html layout just fine.
Well structured text is both readable and has a very long life as it is. There are prime examples at textfiles.com, eg. http://textfiles.com/magazines/LOD/lod-1
