This is tangential, but needs to be stated: What I've learned from email newletters is that Microsoft Outlook needs to die a swift and horrible death. There is absolutely no good reason why we should have to create email newsletters that require tables for layout.
One of my projects over the last couple months for FWD:Everyone has been stripping tables from commercial emails while keeping their content and trying to preserve a comparable layout while just using paragraph tags and other simple markup. It's an interesting challenge, given that tables can be recursively nested inside cells in all sorts of different combinations. You'd think that it wouldn't even be possible to do this and get the ordering of block elements right, but it actually seems to consistently work for tables with mostly text content.
In our case the reason we did this because we want to format emails in a consistent way to make them readable, and also it's easier to guarantee that our redaction tool is properly redacting content when we limit ourselves to a fixed subset of HTML.