Outlook 2007 html padding issues

I’ve spent the last week navigating through the disaster that is Outlook 2007 html rendering. Finally fixed everything and came down to one final issue.

Outlook was taking css padding from one table cell and distributing it across the other cell s in the row. I was getting magical gaps at the tops and bottoms of other cells in the same row. It only seemed to do this on the top and bottom, not the right and left.

Of course, none of the other major email clients (Yahoo, gmail, comcast, msn, thunderbird, Outlook 2003, etc…) did this. Once I found the problem I did a search, and found this nice tidbit.

Cell padding is acting up. This is by far my favorite and I can’t quite grasp the cell padding concept of the new Outlook. You just have to see it to believe me, but sometimes, padding-top adds space on TOP of the cell, NOT INSIDE the cell, so that the borders on top of 2 neighboring cells in the table are not on the same line. Vertical alignment does not help, setting cells to the same height does not help.