HTML email: top and bottom aligned content

Question

The problem

I'm working on an HTML email that contains a list of items and am wondering if the below design is possible, considering the restrictions of email clients.

Currently, I have a table for each item with two cells (we'll call this item-table). The first cell (info-cell) is of variable height and contains item information and links. The second cell (image-cell) contains an image and is also of variable height. This question pertains to this first cell.

I have a table nested in info-cell with two rows, each with one cell. We'll call these cells info-cell-top and info-cell-bottom.

The desired outcome

The desired outcome is to have info-cell-top aligned to the top and with info-cell-bottom aligned to the bottom of info-cell, regardless of the height of item-table.

What I've tried

As this is markup for email, I cannot use rowspan="2" on image-cell to solve this problem. While it works for some desktop email clients, for mobile clients the image cell disappears entirely.

I have also tried to make the inner table stretch to the full height of info-cell, using both height="100%" and height="1".

Both of these solutions look fine in the browser but do not work for email.

The code

Also available to play with at jsfiddle.

<table cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" border="0" width="100%" style="border-top: 1px solid #bbbbbb;">
    <tbody>
        <tr>
            <td style="padding: 16px 0px; border-bottom: 1px solid #bbbbbb;">
                <table cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" border="0" width="100%" height="1">
                    <tbody>
                        <tr>
                            <td style="vertical-align: top;">
                                <table cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" border="0" width="100%" height="100%">
                                    <tbody>
                                        <tr>
                                            <td style="vertical-align: top;">
                                                <strong><a href="#" style="color: #000000; text-decoration: none;">Top aligned</a></strong>

                                                <br>Price
                                                <br>Size
                                                <br>
                                                <br>Wishlist comment - Phasellus sollicitudin consequat consectetur. Morbi a elit leo. Aliquam velit nibh, aliquet quis posuere at, vestibulum nec orci.
                                            </td>
                                        </tr>
                                        <tr>
                                            <td style="vertical-align: bottom;">
                                                <br>
                                                <br> <strong><a href="#" style="color: #000000; text-decoration: none;">Bottom aligned</a>
                                        &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#" style="color: #000000; text-decoration: none;">Add to cart</a>
                                        </strong>

                                            </td>
                                        </tr>
                                    </tbody>
                                </table>
                            </td>
                            <td width="120px" valign="bottom" style="padding-left: 16px;">
                                <div style="text-align: center; background: #ddd; height: 200px;padding: 30px 10px;box-sizing: border-box;"><b>Image with variable height</b>
                                    <br>
                                    <br>(may be shorter than left column)
                                </div>
                            </td>
                        </tr>
                    </tbody>
                </table>
            </td>
        </tr>
    </tbody>
</table>

The plea

Any suggestions for what I could do to achieve my desired outcome? Can you help?

Answer 1

Swap out your CSS vertical-align:top; in the td's for this: <td valign="top">.

valign accepts top|middle|bottom values, while align (horizontal) accepts left|center|right.

For this layout, you will also need either rowspan or a fixed height, as a nested table (your 2 rows of text) will not push to the max height of the container cell.

Here is a basic example of both valign and rowspan applied:

<table width="600" border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0">
  <tr>
    <td width="400" height="200" valign="top" bgcolor="#EEEEEE">Align Top
    </td>
    <td width="200" rowspan="2" valign="middle" bgcolor="#777777">
      <img alt="image" src="" width="200" height="300" style="margin: 0; border: 0; padding: 0; display: block;">
    </td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td width="400" height="300" valign="bottom" bgcolor="#CCCCCC">Align Bottom
    </td>
  </tr>
</table>

It helps to set a height on your rowspanned cells, as Outlook can sometimes guess and mess up your rowspan break points. More info on that here (although it refers to colspan, the same applies)