This suggestion's discussion reveals that some people out there consider "unformatted text" to mean the plainest of plain text, stripped of all encoding/markup, versus source code.

It gives me the screaming twitches to think that there might be enough demand for fully rendered HTML and text stripped of all markup to hand those out, but not enough demand for regular old "what they typed is what you get" text in one's comment notifications.

I'm an anomaly, and I like the junky free web-based e-mail (because I can get to it anywhere, and my friends know it; I switched over from hotmail when boojum alerted me to a security hole that hadn't at that time been patched yet) and raw e-mail without too many bells and whistles.