A toolkit for the basic building blocks of progressive email design.
The basics of every email need to rely on the simplest elements of HTML and CSS. All the bad things you're only supposed to use as a last resort on the web - the inline styling, the !important designators - will be your bread and butter.
It's a tough pill to swallow. It gets even tougher when you spend the morning covered in dirty email code, then switch to clean and current web standards the same afternoon.
And that's where good guides and boilerplates come in. It's really not beneficial to remember all the bad tricks that will make your emails work. Hazardous materials should be quarantined.
I'm just a developer trying to keep track of all the things I've had to figure out. I hope you might find some help here.
For additional strategies and resources, take a look at the project wiki.