WORK ON THE WEB TOO!!
Similar design principles. Same tools. Same HTML and CSS you already know. There's a ton of cross-pollination. + you can impact more of the lifecycle of a user journey (from email to web and vice versa).
I use this method too because I have trouble with @import choking and default Outlook to Times New Roman. However I've run into issues when templates using this code are run through an inliner.
Is this the same issue that Inline Block has on the web? Most browsers add an extra 2px margin on each side? There is a crafty CSS Tricks post that covers various fixes. I've used the comments hack to remove the spaces:
div>one</div><!--
--><div>two</div><!--
--><div>three</div>
I've also found that email layouts are narrow enough for the negative hack to work.
Thanks man! I thought I did the triple back-tick, but whatever you did got these formatted. Cheers.
I also have peaks and troughs, though mine follow more of a 24-hour cycle rather than project lifecycles.
From 8am 2pm or so, I'm at my sharpest. This is my peak performance time.
Between 2pm and 5pm, I loose steam and write code like this, so I try to do meetings, answer email, and write Litmus forum responses in this time. I'm totally unfocused in the late afternoon.
Then sometimes I get a second wind at like 8pm and I ride that as long as it goes. But sometimes I just chill so I can be sharp at 8am the next day.
Thanks so much Adam! I pasted your code in and Outlook rendered, but it was missing the top portion. I dove deeper this morning and I think this bug was caused by a missing <!--[if mso]></td></tr></table><![endif]--> after the text. Probably would have been easier to see if our code blocks above were formatted :)
Thanks so much for helping me look at this!
Started a new discussion: VML Background in Outlook 2007
Started a new discussion: Do you QA emails in less popular mobile clients?