arieng - 5:42 pm on Aug 27, 2009 (gmt 0)

I'd highly recommend looking into hiring an ESP (Email Service Provider). There are some really good ones that are very inexpensive for low quantity mailings (under 10,000 or so). They'll be able to help you with best practices (all of the feedback here is great, but there are volumes of knowledge about emailing you need to know, especially if you are sending commercial messages). Most systems can send email in both text and html format. If the email client can display html, that is what will be shown.

BTW - Rocknbil's 'comment' approach is another elegant solution to the problem.

Another thing to think about with html emails is the use of images. More and more email clients by default do not show images from new senders. Make sure you look at your email with images turned off and try to avoid placing important information within the images.