emails not being received as HTML

Although I modified atlassian-jira/WEB-INF/classes/preferences-default.xml: line 8 changed text to HTML, I received a text e-mail before I visited my preferences. Is this not the correct change to make? I want all new users to receive HTML automatically without forcing them to visit the edit preferences screen. I also changed line 12 change true to false - is that the correct syntax? I think that one worked.