How to make Taxonomy replacement tokens available to the HTML email action in Rules?
Make sure to add a Rules condition Entity has field (related to your field you indicated via the "through a select field..." in your question). 

That's also what is mentioned in the Rules UI, e.g. when you're adding a "data comparison" condition: somewhere it says "The data selector helps you drill down into the data available to Rules. To make entity fields appear in the data selector, you may have to use the condition 'entity has field' (or 'content is of type')".

Your question seems to be related to using such field in a Rules Action (instead of a Rules Condition). However, have a look at the sample rule in included in my answer to "How to specify a Rules condition related to select list values?". That rule doesn't have a "Rules Action" that uses that field (as you seem to try to do). Though using the Rules UI to (eg) edit the message I'd want to display in my sample rule, within the list of tokes available for Replacement patterns for created content, one of them is actually [node:field-optionlist]. And the 'created content' in my case is because of the Rules Event node_insert that's used in my sample rule.

For a video tutorial that illustrates the importance of this Entity has field condition, refer to Data types and data selection, especially what is shown between about 13:30 and 17:30 in it.

PS: To have such field available to use it in any other Rules Condition also, I always add such Entity has field condition BEFORE any other Rules Conditions, if any.