Kudos on the plain text email. I wish more people did this. Especially if your audience is tech-oriented a fair number of them may be using Mutt or reading email in emacs or vim. Even if they are not, they will likely appreciate a straight email that doesn't look like a magazine advert.
Plain-text-format emails are worth very little to most businesses because the vast majority of email clients render HTML and do not tell the user when the email is plain text.
I could send you an HTML email without images and font declarations and it would look exactly like a plain text email in Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, Outlook, Mac Mail, iOS Mail, etc.
I'm not even sure these emails in the story ARE actually plain text emails, because they say they are sending them via Gmail, and Gmail defaults to HTML emails, even for interpersonal emails. In other words they are likely to be text only, but of format HTML.
