HTML, Word And The 'Attach File' Button: The Evil Email Triplets

<rant>As I sit here tediously culling my Outlook archive, a few thoughts that I’ve chewed on in the past resurrect themselves:

1. Why (oh why) is it necessary to substantially size-bloat an email by changing the font type, size, color and other attributes on a word-by-word, sentence-by-sentence and paragraph-by-paragraph basis?
2. To further bloat it by embedding a multi-MByte TIFF image of the company logo, spokesperson, and/or whatever person has been recently hired or promoted (presuming that I even care, which frankly is usually not the case)?
3. And base email format aside, why (oh why) can’t press relations folks provide links to downloadable multi-MByte files, instead of attaching them to emails…that they send me multiple copies of, because they’ve stuck redundant email addresses (pacbell.net, gmail.com, edn.com, reedbusiness.com, etc…) for me in their mass-email (did I say spam? Did I imply spam?) databases?

In summary, why can’t we all use ubiquitious ASCII (aka ‘Plain Text’) as our default email format, as I do, and resist the urge to irresponsibly file-attach?

And when did I become such a Luddite, anyway? </rant>

Comments, fellow Luddites?