Getting mail message contents as html

Hello,
I can see from the Dictionary in Script Debugger that I can get the content property from a mail.app mail message object and it returns rich text. But I think that the sender of the messages sends them in HTML. So I suspect that Apple Mail converts the HTML to rich text.
How can I go about converting it back to HTML ? I know I can parse the rich text and that’d be it, but is there some way that is more expedite, like a function call or something ?
Thanks,
Regards