Online communication e.g. on a mailing list is not documentation or a website. ML is also not a social network or a chat. I'm sure you understand
I think Vinnie has a point though. Formatting (or the lack of) can serve or deserve communication. For quick emails and short replies, the balance usually favors minimal formatting—plain text, short sentences, and clear calls to action. It’s clean, portable, and fast to write and read. But as a technical note grows in length or complexity, its structure has to carry more meaning. At that point, formatting stops being cosmetic and becomes part of the content: it conveys hierarchy, relationships, and emphasis. You can do this in pure plain text, but it raises friction, hurts scanability, discourages participation, and doesn’t scale for detailed or nested material. The lack of properly formatted code blocks is IMO a killer on such ML :) Kind regards, Arnaud