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