Some companies have given up on plain text completely. I'm getting these kind of messages now:
We have tried to send you this email as HTML (pictures and words) but it wasn't possible. In order for you to see what we had hoped to show you please click here to view online in your browser:
<long-url-with-lots-of-tracking-guids>
Ironically in this case the HTML message they so dearly hoped I'd see is only a notification that there is an update and I should go to the website and login to see what the update is. To top it off, the only picture in the message is the company's logo.
The worst part of those is that most of the time the HTML isn't even HTML. It's encoded in some some sort of weird email-html-specific content type. Base64 if you're lucky. Something far more obscure and email-html specific if you not.
When that happens I then have to copy the raw encoded "text" into some shady website $email-html-specific-content-type to text converter just to get the html in it's natural character set to manually find and copy the <long-url-with-lots-of-tracking-guids>.
It's just the confluence of Quoted-printable transfer encoding and the tendency for HTML emails to embed links split up and in non-href and other tags that end up not getting rendered on my thunderbird fork in text mode which means I have to view source and deal with the Quoted-printable URLs.
We have tried to send you this email as HTML (pictures and words) but it wasn't possible. In order for you to see what we had hoped to show you please click here to view online in your browser:
<long-url-with-lots-of-tracking-guids>
Ironically in this case the HTML message they so dearly hoped I'd see is only a notification that there is an update and I should go to the website and login to see what the update is. To top it off, the only picture in the message is the company's logo.