Try nesting them. The multipart/alternative content type is meant more for saying "I can show you this type of content, or this type, you decide." You're doing it right with the multipart/related to combine images with an HTML content type.
multipart/alternative
multipart/related
text/html
image/gif
whatever/else
text/plain (a plain-text version)
If that doesn't work, I might want to see the actual output of your script, if you can reduce it to something small-ish. | [reply] [d/l] |