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I've seen developers use this trick as a way of creating backgrounds for emails. Personally I wouldn't use anything like this unless I absolutely have to! lol
If this were given to me as a build I would probably look to create an image of a t-shirt that had a pretty flat colour where the text would sit and then slice the image in such a way that it left text space. I'd then just have my platform (ET) pull in the last name attribute into place. Obviously this would become quite tricky when making it responsive, and it would also limit you on the image you'd use and where it would be positioned... Personally I like Mark Robbins reply better... ;-p
Actually in Outlook 2013 I too have noticed some weirdness. Recently one of my client templates (which has been fine in testing before) has seen one table towards the bottom of the email bloat with what looks to be extra padding to the top of the table, almost 20 pixels worth of padding. I tried every hack known to mankind but nothing seemed to fix it. In the end we let it go :-( Shamed head hang low