Outlook ’07 adding 1px border/padding to table cells? Fix it!

I’m going to say it – our monthly newsletter is far from perfect. Thankfully, we always get amazing feedback and learn something new from our readers.

One of our readers kindly pointed out that Outlook ’07 was adding a 1px white border/padding to the thumbnails in our design. These thumbnails are enclosed in a table cell with a background color applied, to form a two-tone border. In most email clients, this border is flush with the grey background color:

But in Outlook ’07, a white border appears (which also causes the right-side of the border to disappear completely):

Thankfully, there’s a very elegant and quick fix to this. Simply add the following snippet to your CSS styles:

table td { border-collapse: collapse; }

… and poof! No more white border and peace restored to the valley. Hopefully this great tip will save you much hair-pulling when you prepare your newsletters!