Is it absolutely necessary to use tables for HTML emails?

Question

I have to design some HTML emails for my work. It seem obvious that everybody use tables and inline CSS for this. I would use plain text if I would have the choice, but it's not possible in this case.

As a front end developer who know a bit about web standards I'm pretty scary and horrified when I look at some HTML emails: table presentations and inline CSS are enough to demonstrate that this will be a horrible headache to design and maintain.

Do you have experiences with this? What arguments could be valuable to advocate plain text? What are the risks of using standard-maintainable-pretty HTML and CSS and not the horrible-common-way?

look at http://www.campaignmonitor.com/css/ which seems to be a good reference of what you can expect to work and not work in popular email clients — SirDarius, Mar 28 '13 at 10:46
Also look at this css inliner tool: http://premailer.dialect.ca/ — biziclop, Mar 28 '13 at 10:58

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Mar 28 '13 at 12:35

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Some useful links for better understanding

http://kb.mailchimp.com/article/how-to-code-html-emails/

http://blog.mailchimp.com/background-images-and-css-in-html-email/

answered Mar 28 '13 at 12:35

Sunil Soundarapandian

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Is it absolutely necessary to use tables for HTML emails?

1 Answers1