I use a Palm m130 PDA. It comes with a software called "Palm Email". It is a software on the Palm OS that syncs with the outloook / outlook express and other popular windows email clients and puts the emails on the PDA so that I can read and reply when travelling. The interesting thing here is that being a PDA and therefore living with low resources, it has only text based emails support. However, that does not make my html mails unreadable. What the software does is to read the html tags, converts it into a relavent text format.
Surely there must be such functions already available for text based email clients in linux also.
Yes, my Pine does this. I don't know about Mutt. Pine fails only when it encounters frames, and it generally creates a hash of tables, but then tables would be messed up with even plain-text formats, usually.
I find HTML messages totally unreadable when I receive digests from mailing lists. But then if the mailing list manager makes MIME coded digests, I have no problems. Unfortunately, a lot Linux mailing lists are running on mailing list managers which don't seem to be able to make MIME coded digests. (Linux Bangalore's lists, on yahoogroups.com, are among them). Those become a royal pain to read.
I am a totally text-mode junkie (my laptop runs Linux, I write all official documents in LaTeX, etc) but even with my text-mode limitations, I seem to find less problems handling HTML than some others on this list. Therefore, I get the impression that part of the problem is because we're using inappropriate software (e.g. non-MIME mailing list managers, non-MIME mail archiving software, older versions of Pine, etc) for the job.
Other issues like bandwidth consumption, etc, are of course legit.
Shuvam