Robbin,
If you are sending ah HTML email then you need to use following :
mail ($to, $subject, $message, $headers)
$to and $subject are easy enough.
The $message can then be constructed of HTML and display whatever background you like, e.g.
<head>
<title>title</title>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
</head>
<body bgcolor="#FFFFFF" text="#000000" link="#0099CC" vlink="#0099CC" alink="#0099CC">
...
</body>
Also, you need to make sure the mail command is sending HTML format and that is defined in headers as follows:
$headers = "MIME-Version: 1.0\r\n";
$headers .= "Content-type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1\r\n";
$headers .= "From: les@politiks.co.nz\r\n";
Then you can use mail(...) function.
Cheers
C.