It manages to read _some_ HTML emails but there are definitely still tons of rough edges. Turns out email parsing is not fun. :-)
I guess it should possible to run HTML emails through lynx (or some equivalent library) that just dumps the text?
If the email's a picture, oh well.
Not a bad idea though lynx doesn't do a great job parsing HTML emails either, unfortunately. Turns out it's an annoying problem irrespective of the email "client"