# Figma to HTML Email: How to Stop Rebuilding Your Designs in Crappy Editors https://emaillove.com/figma-to-email I’ve been designing and building emails for 15+ years, and I’m going to be honest with you: the process has always kind of sucked. You spend hours crafting the perfect email design in Figma. Your team loves it. Your stakeholders approve it. Then you open up your ESP’s drag-and-drop editor and… nothing matches. The fonts are wrong. The spacing is off. That beautiful layout you designed? Good luck recreating it with those clunky content blocks. So you do what every email marketer does: you compromise. You simplify. You rebuild. And three hours later, you’re looking at something that’s maybe 70% as good as what you originally designed, wondering why email has to be this hard. ## Why email code is stuck in the 90s Here’s the thing most people don’t realize: email clients are basically time machines to the early 2000s. While the rest of the web evolved to use modern CSS and flexbox layouts, email clients (I’m looking at you, Outlook) still require table-based layouts and inline CSS. It’s like trying to build a Tesla with Model T parts. But why? Email clients prioritize security and consistency over innovation. They’re terrified of letting emails run scripts or use modern CSS that could break their interface or pose security risks. So they strip out most modern HTML and CSS features before rendering your email. Microsoft Outlook is the worst offender. It uses Microsoft Word’s rendering engine (yes, the same one from your word processor) to display emails. That’s why your perfectly designed email looks like hot garbage in Outlook—you’re literally asking a document editor to render a web page. Gmail has its own quirks. It strips out