E-mail formatting

I’m never sure whether or not to use the old-school ”>” indent in reply e-mails. I like the way it looks, and I especially like that it makes it easy and convenient to pick out particular sections of an e-mail and respond to those.

I have Outlook set, however, not to use them because the flip side of using the little indent indicators is that it’s impossible beyond belief to cut and paste something that’s been demolished by them. I kind of wish there were some actual standard “rich” formatting for e-mail, and that all e-mail clients could play nice with colors, because that would totally solve the problem.

I suppose the larger question is: who cares?