[development] State of the Mail Addres (was HTML / Plain text emails)

[Robert Douglass]

It would be helpful if we could get a summary of where development 
stands with regards to mail functionality of all sorts. I know it has 
been an active 6 months in this arena, but the work that's been done 
hasn't been publicized, and people who weren't involved in the 
development (like me) have no idea what is out there and what the best 
code to use is.

1. What happened to the initiative to make a mail.inc?
2. What are the best/newest modules that have major mail functions, like 
mailing lists, mailhandler, newsletter, subscription etc.?

If we can generate a decent summary here, on-list, I'll do a write-up of 
the results on Drupal.org.

-Robert