Jay R. Ashworth wrote:
The communities I hang out in (and I was on Usenet since 1984 or so, back when I could still read The Entire Feed) tended to stick to *bold* and _whatever_; I didn't see /these sort of italics/ much, partially because it conflicts with search string notation, I suspect.
FWIW, [[Crossmark]] uses *boldface*, /italicized/, _underlined_ and Mozilla Thunderbird automatically recognizes the same syntax in plaintext mail.