title: Is it absolutely necessary to use tables for HTML emails?
body: <p>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.</p>
  
  <p>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.</p>
  
  <p>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? </p>