Fonts in e-mail – please don't!

Friends of mine have remarked on my "boring" plain text e-mails but dear Reader(s) the horror that I try to avoid is the one on the left, as displayed in GMail on Chrome. Through naïveté or bad luck and an ill-advised copying-and-pasting event sequence, this newsletter has turned into a real canine petit déjeuner of text and formatting. I suspect the delusion that formatted e-mail is nice to be fuelled by the mistaken presumption that this is a way of transferring a pretty image from the writer's screen to that of the reader. But the appropriate tool for that is an image or PDF type format! The security and privacy risks around formatted (HTML) e-mail are another topic...