Should be, sure. Will be, probably not. As my colleague Jeffrey Zeldman observes, there’s an Email Standards Project web site, and for years it’s lacked a style sheet. Now, the content is all still there and readable, but there’s a profound sense of neglect. That seems to sum up the state of trying to bring sanity and consistency (never mind elegance) to HTML emails.
Which is why I always configure my mail clients to show me plain text, by the way. MailMate, my preferred client, makes this pretty simple.