ActionMailer template issues?

I’m using ActionMailer and it’s working fine when actually sending
mail. I have a TestEmailController whose job it is to render sample
versions of each email we send and show them in a browser for review
by QA & our creative teams.

Currently, I’m using the create_* method in ActionMailer, and then
trying render :text => email.part[1]. When I do this, the text/html
email part appears to be encoded for SMTP (I know zero about SMTP) and
so I’ve got 3Ds and linebreaks all over my code. Is there some way to
convert the email part back to HTML for rendering in a browser?

Initially, I was trying to render the html template directly, but
there are some oddities around the template search path in partials
below the main RHTML template I’m using, so I went back to the first
method. I’ll go back to direct template rendering if folks think
that’s a better way…

thx,
–dwf