This might be me being old, but I still don't understand why html emails aren't the exception. If you want to do a fancy newsletter, trying to sell me crap, I can see why you'd need the images, the css and html. In most other cases, I don't really get the point.
- You are sending a receipt and want table alignment for items
- You want to put a logo of your company so that readers can recognize who's the email from
- You want to make unsubscribe link smaller and the "open the thing I'm notifying you about" link bigger, so that people would know which one is which without reading the url
Mostly those seems to be more about you as a sender wanting to do some branding or manipulation of the reader. I don't really see how it benefit the receiver, which should be the main concern of all communications.