add text only version to an email template

We use mandrill to send emails and we have many templates defined to send emails. Below is one such template

<!doctype html>
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
  <head>

    <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8"/>

    <style type="text/css">
        ----- some styling information ----

    </style>
  </head>

  <body>
    ------ Other html content ------
  </body>
</html>

As you can see there is no mention of text only version of this email template. To improve the chances of this email not going to spam i also want to add text only version of it as well. I got to know about "multipurpose internet mail extensions" but i still do not understand how i can make my email to have a text only version too.

I will be really grateful for any kind of help on this.

Solution

Strongly suggest using a templating service on top of Mandrill, such as apostle or sendwithus.

Makes it way easier to manage and edit html+text templates, and I believe both support your use case.