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I was wondering why tables are most preferred while sending emails.

Edits:

I was studying templates from http://zurb.com/ink/ and saw that everything had tables. I like using bootstrap and saw that Zurb Ink had similar functionalities as bootstrap3 (ex. responsiveness). However, all templates had tables in them.

So, I started studying if bootstrap 3 (the CSS atleast) could be applied to HTML mails to be sent using PHP. I stumbled upon articles saying tables were the best way to go. However, I do not understand why.

Edit:

Another post that helped me: Why are tables used in HTML emails?. Thanks to @dystroy.

Another comprehensive article on mail-styling: http://mailchimp.com/resources/guides/email-marketing-field-guide/.

Best!

Community
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dbx834
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3 Answers3

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It's not really about blocking CSS as Shivan says, but rather about CSS support of email clients. Outlook and Thunderbird render CSS2.1 very differently.

To put it another way, emails clients are stuck at 1995 when it comes to rendering CSS. So we're stuck with having pages like we did in 1995 to have them look the same everywhere: table layouts.

Florian Margaine
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HTML Table does not depend on CSS, which layout has less chance to be distorted, compared to DIV+CSS layout.

As different email service providers have different policy to HTML emails and CSS, it is safer to use HTML table as layout in emails, as CSS (even with inline CSS) may be blocked / filtered, or even worse, half-blocked.

As a sidenote, Gmail will increase Spam score when the table width > 620 pixels.

Raptor
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Email programs suck at rendering css. + if you are using some kind of webmail client the css is stripped since it would conflict with the site's stylesheets. inline styles does not effect the global css scope and this is normally permitted.

Dieter Gribnitz
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