HTML email and tracking

So I get this message that's a nicely formatted HTML email, but it has a message at the top about my email client not supporting HTML. I thought about it for a second, then realized that Thunderbird says the message references external assets which it hasn't loaded. So I'm thinking either CSS or image. Sure enough, this is in the code:

<a href="http://www.educause.edu/email/ecar/ers0602_1b/track.asp?id=header"><img src="http://www.educause.edu/email/ecar/images/header.gif" width="281" height="86" border="0" alt="ECAR - EDUCAUSE Center for Applied Research | If you can see this, your e-mail client does not support HTML e-mail messages. Please copy and paste the following URL into your browser's address bar to see the message: http://www.educause.edu/email/ecar/ers0602_1b.html" /></a>

So the question is whether it's just people who have no clue what they're doing, they did it to get the plain text version to come out the way it did (which means they need a better tool to send these if that's the case), or if they're trying to get people to click through just to read the email for tracking reasons. Given the source I'm somewhat leaning towards the tracking. :( The fact that every link in the thing goes through track.asp and there's a clear.gif at the bottom doesn't help go away from that opinion either. At least they don't seem to be tracking individuals with it, but it seems a little excessive either way.