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I have, but I have always used normal html+css?

That works for simple emails, but when you start creating more complex designs tables are an essential tool to ensuring that every element behaves as you would expect:

https://templates.mailchimp.com/getting-started/html-email-b...

Building these types of emails without tables is doable, but you are going to get a lot of inconsistency depending on the device/client/browser.

I had worked on a project in 2010. It was a service that let you pick email stationary, customize it, and had a Outlook add-in and a bookmarklet.

It "worked" in Outlook (2003, 2007, 2010), Yahoo, Hotmail, and Gmail. And had to display correctly to the recipient in each of those clients.

It was by far the biggest pain in the ass I've ever worked on. Tables weren't enough to make it work outright. Outlook 2007+ couldn't do background images on a table cell, gmail would collapse empty cells, hotmail would remove certain inline styles, and yahoo was actually pretty nice.

The company I worked for took the project on for an equity split + payment plan, we saw a few hundred dollars from it before they went out of business.

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