Designing HTML-enhanced e-mails

One of my pet hates are e-mail lists that have embedded HTML content and don't have a "text only" version.
IMHO e-mail is not designed to have html embedded in it - before everyone jumps on and says "yes it is" I will add that a lot of clients support it, but _not_ all - this is mentioned in the section on graphics in the article - the other situation which will remove linked graphical content is where the e-mail browser is not allowed outside a firewall. Many a "pretty" e-mail has been rendered unreadable to me after I have escaped through the various firewall access request messages, and when I have to press escape 20 times (one request for every embedded image/object) just to open the mail it's not particularly conducive to my willingness to actually read it.
One of my friends has given up reading e-mails from certain people because he sees all the html tags (and he would be the first to admit that he's not technical at all) so what he actually receives is pretty much gibberish to him. So if you _do_ have to embed then try to keep it to blocks of html tags, then blocks of text so if the tag contents _are_ displayed it doesn't make the rest of the content unreadable.

=8)

I'm currently in the process of setting up an email newsletter for my local Chamber of Commerce.

The general presentation is finished, but now I need to streamline it to address the issues brought up in the article.

Any suggestions would be much appreciated.

You can view it here
http://newsletter.it-strategies.net/emailNewsletter_9.htm

or
Download it here
http://newsletter.it-strategies.net/EmailNewsletter_ZIP

Thanks,
Paul