Nice work Jerrad. I can't help you with the images in the e-mail (it is hard enough getting the images in the store to function correctly!) but I think I can help you with the resizing issue. Try replacing this:
Code:
image_x=$product.image_x image_y=$product.image_y
with this:
Where 100 is whatever number you want the x dimension to be. You could also get rid of the x variable and set the dimension for y as well. This worked fine for me in products.tpl, I don't see why it shouldn't work in the e-mail templates. Just a thought!