Be sure the admin email address is like this:
admin@your_domain.com
This format might not work:
<admin>admin@your_domain.com
Beyond that I really haven't debugged email problems.
Adding content "sequentially" to the left (or right) column is pretty straight forward.
At the end of
/catalog/includes/column_left.php (or
column_right.php)
after the closing php tag, add your code like this:
<tr><td align="center">
******** DELETE THIS LINE AND PUT THE HTML FOR CONTENT HERE ********
</td></tr>
<tr><td align="center">
******** DELETE THIS LINE AND PUT THE HTML FOR CONTENT HERE ********
</td></tr>
<tr><td align="center">
******** DELETE THIS LINE AND PUT THE HTML FOR CONTENT ********
</td></tr>
And so on....