An all image newsletter: Bad idea or not?

Certain brands can ‘get away’ with sending an all image (or nearly all image) newsletter: others have to tread carefully or their newsletters will never arrive in the inbox: the nightmare of any email marketer. Having a look at the email newsletter from Welikefashion.com, the design looks like this:

Full version can be found here, and archive of earlier newsletters from Welikefashion.com can be found here. As you can see the email is all image, cut up in separate parts. There are things to be said for this, but also against this.
Advantages include the following:
– Design rules: appeal to the receiver is hightened when you can go all out with the design.
– Minimal rendering issues:  an all image simple structured email will have minimal to no issues rendering in email clients.
– Custom fonts: as follow up to the Design rules you can use the sweetest fonts without trouble.
– Animated gifs: you can really go all out when you use animated gifs: nothing beats a moving image to grab attention, right?
Disadvantages count too:
– Not optimized for images off: receivers will see a big blank email until they download images. Not the greatest first impression.
– No link action: css with images is tricky in email land, so hover/visted/etc actions are limited.
– No specific words to link: your tracking can be limited depending on how/where you put the links, even with image maps.
– Spam counts: images cannot be ‘read’  by spam filters, therefor many put image heavy emails in the spam folder.
These are just some of the specifics that have to be thought of when going for an all image email design: the trouble is that there is no golden rule: one company will benefit greatly from as many graphics as possible, while another might actually do more bad than good to the email program. Check to see who your target group is, what devices they use and what they actually want to receive: but of course the way you want to present your news has to count too. It’s the business card of your business every single time it is sent out, so to speak.