What is the best practice for compiling an email template for a newsletter?

Question

css

Task: compose a letter template for future newsletters, etc.
Essence of the question: having read on the Internet, I realized that it is definitely the best practice to build a template using tables. But here's a moment: someone writes a style to the elements right inside them (for example: span style="..." or p style="...") and repeats this with each element, and someone renders everything either to the general style / style" or to a separate css.
And I like the second option more, since the body of the letter is not littered with repetitive code, but on the other hand, there is an opinion that in this case, styles may be lost or displayed incorrectly, and some mailers generally throw out from the head letter and do not cling to css.
Please tell me what is the best way to do it? Does such a problem really occur often or is everything not so scary?
Thank you!

Answer 1

foundation.zurb.com/emails.html