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Apple Mail - Again? - The Technological:

"Now to add insult to injury it's become known Tiger's Apple Mail stores plain text mail as good old HTML cruft - even if you the user explicitly request to deal solely in plain text.
It's easy to demonstrate. Fire up a Panther system, start a new message within Apple Mail, type in something trivial, save the message as a draft, and then hit [OPT+COMMAND+U] to see the raw code."

This is as bad as Microsoft Outlook (Express?) trying to be smart and sending two copies of the same message: one in plain text and one in HTML. I have received a couple of those over the past few days and I really hate how they display.

But I really hate the behavior of Apple Mail because it's a pernicious bug. As long as you type out your e-mail and send it without saving it as a draft then it will obey your preferences to send it as plain text. The problem happens unsuspectingly after you choose to save the message as a draft.

This is an important issue because it makes me feel like a hypocrite. I always tell people to send me plain text e-mail and here I am sending them HTML e-mail. In my defense, it's all Apple Mail's fault.

Update: In general, I think the acceptance for HTML e-mail has risen somewhat over the past few years. I don't mind receiving them once in a while but I generally do not send them for fear of them being filtered out by a recipient who detests HTML format. So the fact that my mail client silently sends them is still an issue to me.