Emails are permanent records. Your focus seems to be on how they sound to the initial recipient.

My concern is how they sound to the person reading them six months or two years later. What I have found is that the longer the delay between having written the email and it being read, the more pissed off the reader is when they are reading it. If the problem is big enough that they need to come back to me two years later, the reader is probably not going to appreciate the lighthearted jests I originally included.

My work emails with colleagues are brusque and formulaic. I don’t include enough content to even begin to guess at mood or emotional state.

I’m not saying you should use email this way. I’m saying that I have little use for adjectives, articles, and my recipients rarely have need for a scroll wheel. I can’t imagine ever using either an emoticon or an emoji in a work email.