Do they have an unsubscibe link that reports to their central database or CMS. If not, then how are they managing the unsubscribes as required by law. There sales team most certainly are not doing it. These are still marketing emails despite them being sent directly and legitimate interest does not apply directly to marketing emails in the same way it does other forms of marketing.
Do they care at all about mobile optimisation? If so then OFT will not deliver that. It will in fact directly harm that experience for all of the users on mobile. Which would be a significant number in most cases.
Do they care for any sort of effective reporting? Unless 3rd party reporting is used and compiled or fed into a centralised structure, then they will lose out.
OFT limitations will mean things such as logos or any image over image backgrounds cannot be used. Other OFT rendering quirks will also create a bad experience for your content in certain ESP's.
You cannot effectively test OFT's I have found. You may test with Litmus or EOA, but I have found the results to differ greatly from live testing.
Not entirely sure what's going wrong on your end but here is my test result for Outlook 2013 with the above code
Weird. If I select it by clicking before the opening table and draging my mouse it works. Hard to see the highlight but works
You can use this. It is fluid as well so will scale.
<table width="100%" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0">
<tr>
<td width="100" style="padding:10px; font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" align="center">Robe Maxi</td>
<td>
<table width="100%" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0">
<tr>
<td> </td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td bgcolor="#333333" height="1" style="line-height:2px; height:2px; font-size:0px; mso-line-height-rule:exactly"> </td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td> </td>
</tr>
</table>
</td>
<td width="100" style="padding:10px; font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" align="center">€ 59,99</td>
</tr>
</table>
Also if you just want all your links to change color on hover state you can apply it as just a:hover { color: #4471c3 !important; }. Then you don't need to add any class to your <a> tags
I have commented a fair bit on OFT's in this community. It seems OFT's are widely used. Particularly in B2B.
The things I always put forward when a client wants to do OFT is this:
Unfortunately, it seems that OFT's are indeed used a lot. I find the fact that many companies are not even willing set up basic accounts to send emails and report to a centralised place quite lazy and so their campaigns should suffer as a result. I try to make my clients aware that using OFT's will almost always be inferior to using a proper platform. They have their place, but that place is very limited for any external marketing activity.
Use a gif background on your main HTML container and then add a fallback image in the MSO specific code. The gif should then work where its supported and be static where it is not supported. It should also fallback to the MSO code when in outlook.
Are you viewing it on Outlook 120DPI. Like a Dell XPS laptop or hi density screen?
Unfortunately, you cannot nest VML backgrounds. At least to the best of my knowledge.