PhpMailer does not show altbody, but unformatted html text

[empieters]

I use phpmailer. I have included the program below. I send an email with a html table. I also include a text to show as alternative for programa that cannot read the html.

When I sent the email, the Outlook shows the content of the table but unformatted. Why does it not sent the text in altbody? I have tried Opera but there it always shows the table although I select plain text mode.

What I want is to send people an html email and if they cannot read it a link to a copy of the email on the internet.

Here the code:

function MailNew($from,$to,$subject,$text,$htmltext)
  {
  require("phpmailer/class.phpmailer.php");

  $mail = new PHPMailer();
  $mail->CharSet = 'UTF-8';
  $mail->IsSMTP();

  $mail->From = $from;
  $mail->FromName = $fromname;
  $mail->AddAddress("email@address.it","");
  $mail->AddReplyTo($from,$fromname);

  $mail->WordWrap = 50;
  $mail->IsHTML(true);

  $mail->Subject = $subject;
  $mail->Body    = $htmltext;
  $mail->AltBody = $text;

  if(!$mail->Send())
    {
    echo "Message could not be sent. <p>";
    echo "Mailer Error: " . $mail->ErrorInfo;
    exit;
    }
  }

$table .= "<table border=1>";
$table .= "<tr>";
$table .= "<td>";
$table .= "Column 1";
$table .= "</td>";
$table .= "<td>";
$table .= "Column 2";
$table .= "</td>";
$table .= "</tr>";
$table .= "<tr>";
$table .= "<td>";
$table .= "Column 1";
$table .= "</td>";
$table .= "<td>";
$table .= "Column 2";
$table .= "</td>";
$table .= "</tr>";
$table .= "</table>";

MailNew("email@address.it","email@address.it","This is subject","This is plain tekst","This is the HTML message body <b>in bold!</b>$table");