I recently had to create new thank you and receipt emails for our donation system. Creating an email from scratch is not recommended as there are so many different email clients out there. Most notably there is Outlook that has extreme limitations on what works and what doesn't. Couple that with the need to look good on mobile (aka responsive design), and you'll see why it's best to leverage a solid template that takes all of these things into account.
I ended up going with Zurb's Foundation templates. There is a lot of CSS and nested tables in them. But once you get over all the crazy amounts of structural HTML required, it's pretty easy to just pop your content into rows and cells and have it turn out well.
Even though these templates should take care of everything, I highly recommend testing using Email on Acid or a similar service. It is so easy to have typo in your HTML completely break things.
Speaking of that, it's always a good idea to run your code through the W3C HTML validator service. You will get a few errors simply because the templates are using some seriously old-school markup. But it has helped me catch and fix some dumb errors (like using a parenthesis rather than a curly bracket in my CSS or forgetting an close tag).
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