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And judging by the number of subscribers to Peter Cooper's newsletter empire, and my own humble offerings, many technical people have a different tolerance, too.

That's true, but when you find yourself being the person responsible for implementing and sending bulk email, it helps to keep a sense of humor about it.

Absolutely :)

All HTML email is spam.

Spam is unsolicited email. I have 3,000 subscribers who voluntarily subscribed to a (primarily) HTML email newsletter.

Why HTML instead of plain text? So that I can send articles with syntax highlighted code snippets.

I'd encourage you to A/B test a text-only newsletter versus an HTML one. Or even just ask people which they prefer. I think you're in the minority.